"Children..........................."

My oldest daughter and I did seven laps around the soccer field together when she got home from work last night, the area nearly void of other people and a cool breeze making the temperature not as hot as it would be otherwise. Her company eliminates my usual mental exercise undertaken at such time, but conversation with her is always welcomed and her pace takes me up a notch or two, the effort to keep up with her surely burning off more than just a few extra calories. Our discussion, as it usually does on these jaunts, turned to “life in the church”. She was only about seven when the neighbors started taking her and her younger sister to Sunday school, over five sixths of her forty-eight years a matter of being attached to this assembly. She has survived legalism, the charismatic invasion, and her father’s change of identity along the way. My reasons, though, for such abdication of all former commitments to this bunch, as well as my being happy that she and her husband have nonetheless remained involved, are known to her. I am proud of the two young men my grandsons have become, their values rooted in a Christ who is real and in parents who have lived that truth in front of them. The two of us talk: of what faith really involves, of just how deep His grace extends unto us, a confirmation of the connection, and of how humanity remains humanity, even “in” Christ, our inabilities and failures not just dismissed, but patiently put on the Potter’s wheel as we submit ourselves unto Him. I am her father, inwardly knotted to her in love, the relationship much the same as that which we know with our Creator via the Holy Ghost; and there is no doubt in my mind that I owe our earthly paternal bond to my having placed it all into His hands over four decades ago……