Each person needs to sense the uniqueness of his or her own person. It is true that no two persons are alike. There is that combination of all factors in us that differentiates us to God from all other persons – and to ourselves. There is something in each person that taken alone, is alone with God. With that personal factor, special for the individual and special for God, each person finds his or her own way to ultimate identity with God, or resorting to self without God. We see the mystery in a parental relationship with children. I have four children, and each one is clearly individualized from siblings. Each one loves me, and I feel that love, with or without their presence, but there is a slightly different file folder that opens in my mind when my thought or conduct relates to this one from that one. I tend to shy away from the impressions counselees have given when they say, My Mom (or Dad) loved my brother and sister more than she loved me. That is possible of course, and occurs far more often than we care to believe, but not nearly as often as the accusation has been made. The love for one has a slightly different recipe in it from the love for the other. Both are genuine, but do not meet the tastes of all persons in the family. The love of the father for the prodigal was misinterpreted by the brother who was faithful to the father. When the father had the fatted lamb prepared for the returning prodigal, the brother thought: Dad loves him more than me. He never gave such a gift to me, and I have been here caring for him and his property all along. Father explained the contexts of his love that equated love above what appeared to be partiality. The point was magnificent in that we love and accept love without determining human accents that may relate to something other than love. The love for the faithful son must not be diminished or evaluated in the expressions of love for the prodigal son. The faithful son interpreted love in faithfulness to be awarded. The prodigal seems to have interpreted it in terms of security for himself. The father saw the return of the prodigal as restoring a family of at least three loving persons, so to chalk up a victory for the gift of God that is meant to bind us to each other. The faithful son was turning faithfulness, a virtue, into a means.
One of the striking statements, of many remembered, that have come from persons who have looked to me for counsel was offered as a daughter discussed the planning for her aging parents, and how a pattern ought to be accomplished. She knew that I had personal interest as well as counseling responsibility related to her parents, dear friends of mine. She said, in a voice of love and understanding: My brother has always been a favorite of Dad in business, and he is the oldest of the five of us. We have decided that it is easier for him and Dad to plan what ought to be done. She was clear that the favoritism of her brother and father did not subtract from the love she had for her parents, and they for her. She seemed to have, for me, a sense of understanding the conditions and practicality for that which is human while holding to the beauty of love that she saw as genuine and given of God. It was foretold in the experience of Abraham with his son, Isaac, when the rescue of Isaac was verified in the love of God. Abraham and Isaac learned the meaning of love eternal in the obedience of the separate selves to the love and will of God.
We could not have perceived the future to write a scenario for this dear daughter of my friends. It was found that she had a deadly cancer. She knew she was going to die, and told her father and mother. The planning for parental last days turned into planning for hers. God closed her life in victory. I saw the pain on her parents’ faces, in the silence that engulfed them, in the love they felt was interrupted until eternity’s privileges. They sank visibly, but with no diminution of their faith that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. For me, the wisdom of that dear daughter made a life story that seemed to declare that every person is different, but with a high point of individual accounting for life and love that few others quite possess. She, her parents, and siblings won by each accepting the context God had for each one. Beauty can be found in a life, when there are reduced negatives – like jealousy. The story meaning, and there is more to be told, was spiritual. The elder brother in Luke 15 misinterpreted the rule of families in passing leadership to the eldest son as duty right for family care. His father’s entreaty became a correcting lesson. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020