Fatherless Days

"Take these pieces thrown away

Put them together from night and day

Washed by the sun, dried by the rain, 

To be my father in the fatherless days."

"Always," Newsboys, 1998

I work in a place where I see many kids without parents actively involved in their lives. For the part of the parents, they believe they have done the best thing a parent could do by sending their children to a boarding school. Here they will, in theory at least, learn to speak English, the language of money, and make connections within the United States, thereby increasing the kids' chance of finding a high-paying job and living a life of ease.

In a meeting yesterday, we talked about what our job is as advisers. How much of the students' lives fall on us to care for? The truth? Well, Latin scholars, you tell me, what does in loco parentis mean to you? And how about in loco parentis omni die? Even if we weren't so outnumbered, we wouldn't be able to care for them with the holistic concern and unconditional love of a parent.

On my good days, I have to fight the urge to pity these students. I constantly remind myself that I, too, grew up with a parent in absentia, and I'm okay, aren't I? Because pity only ever reduced me to a victim, when love could have empowered me.

Regarding these lyrics, then, I have been puzzling over them for the past fourteen years. The sun does not wash. The rain does not dry. Except... if everything is backward and upside-down in this world. What's more, most potters start with soft clay, I've heard. But perhaps broken pieces are the only useful form for God to shape? I mean, he raises the dead! (He has strange past times.) He can begin with all these broken pieces, make them soft, and create a thing beautiful to behold in the final light. 

"Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day" (2 Cor. 4:16). Things begin working backward from the time we enter his kingdom at Jesus' invitation. We are becoming children to enter into the Kingdom. And such a Father we have! (I have recently added to my list of things I know about him that he is playful and exuberant, the very definition of life!)

So, I grew up without a dad much in the picture. And I'm only okay insomuch as that lack has made me seek out the true Father. And as I find him, I have plenty of pieces to offer him. I'm thinking we only ever bring pieces to the Lord. I'm hoping this will inform how I see my students: people in pieces, like me, with a Father waiting to adopt them.