What The Hoopla was About

What The Hoopla was About

(“Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.” Luke 15:20b)

It was completely unexpected. Servants scurried to buy balloons
and helium tanks. Chefs stewed, smoked, and roasted all the stores
on the farm.
The musicians were lined up, setting their equipment on a flat-bed truck,
still uncertain what the hoopla was all about.

The father’s eyes drooped as days went on. His tears dropped like
rain on the dust around his sandals. He worked his horses hard.
He carried both a burden and diamond of reflections he knew were
brighter than the weeks he had endured. When a son leaves a father,
the rooms are silent; there are gaps in the stories around the dinner table.

The father was not angry. But a son was lost, a boy was dead, and
would found and alive fix anything at all?

He measured his gaze from the porch to the end of the field. He took
the place of a sentry in the warming morning leading till noon. Was their
a dust trail on the horizon? Was there a voice that would make his heart
spin again? When you love deeply you lose nothing though your son has
moved outside the circumference of time. Love is held in reserve,
or how shall the party be ready if all we do is forget?

A certain day, it is difficult to know it precisely, there came a shadow
up the road. There came a boy with shoulders hunched over. There came a
son
who did not think he should be a son. There came a boy who thought
he should be a slave.

Fathers know none of that nonsense. Mothers bake bread every day in hopes
the runaway will show up, sneaking in the screen door from the back porch.

This is love, this sprinting embrace. This is love, this kissing of the face.
This is love, this father, son, son, mother, though not all enjoyed the party.
This is love that surrenders

To foolish shenanigans and brings the children home.