Tomorrow I travel to California for my son's college graduation.  It is a bittersweet moment.  I'm happy for him to be able to step into the world, I'm pleased for him to have fresh opportunity to shape his destiny, I'm joyful for what awaits him, for the many hopes and dreams he will pursue.  However, as I suspect most parents of children in this situation do, I also fear for him.  Although I have no doubt that he will make his way in good form, I nonetheless fear for him.  I fear for his safety, I fear for his livelihood, I fear for his person.  How could I not?  I've watched him from the day he was born.
     It is of course too easy to say that, as many people of faith do, God will take care of him, that God will ensure that he finds his way.  Though I do not dispute that God is, as he is in all of our lives, working in my son's life, that he is steadfastly active in all that he does, I always wonder:  how does he do it?
     This is a mystery I hope no one ever thinks--or pretends to think--he or she can unravel.  Those of us who invest in a living and personal God walk in a tension, a tension that runs through everything about our existence.  We believe God is there, we believe he is active, but we in no way will ever know, fully and precisely, how he is doing so today. Yes, when Jesus walked on the planet we caught a foretaste of it, but never the full picture. This side of eternity we never will.
     But that's OK.  Whether we find the mystery of existence in the hidden purposes of God or in the unfathomability of the cosmos, we remain in awe of what we will never understand fully.  As I consider this in light of my son's pending entrance into the "big, bad world," I realize anew the futility of human speculation on what will come.  All I know and believe that God is there, present, active, and expressing himself in profoundly remarkable love, the love that moves, as medieval writer Dante Alighieri writes in his Divine Comedy, his imagined journey through the depths of hell and the heights of heaven, "the sun and moon and stars."  God's love is all.
     Because I'll be traveling, I will not be posting again until later next week.  Thanks for reading!