The Airport, the Military Family, and the Cry of Abandonment

The scene is Raleigh-Durham Airport. I'm dropping my wife and kids off for a trip to Poppy and Grandma's house for a couple of days while I stay behind to work.

I'm waving good-bye to them as they go through security, feeling the sadness of their leaving.

Behind me, I hear pre-teen shrieks: "Daddy! Daddy!" I look back and see three kids and a mom behind them with a camera. Coming through the arrivals door is a man dressed in military garb.

This scene of military family, reunited, always stirs my soul. My dad was in the Navy. Sometimes, he was gone for months. I still can feel the adrenaline-rush of 6-year-old anticipation as we watched the ship pull under the Newport, Rhode Island bridge and into port.

My dad, home at last after adventures and danger on the Cold War-laden North Atlantic. I can still remember the impossible-to-satisfy feeling of just wanting to be in daddy's presence 24/7 for eternity to make up for lost time.

These kids at the airport were getting their daddy back. I was sending my wife and kids off.

Then the Lord reminded me of the next question in the Scriptures that I looked at yesterday but decided to put off engaging with until today in order to have more time to consider it: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Jesus' cry of dereliction. It's a cry of abandonment, of having been left. Jesus becomes sin for us, and the Father leaves him to carry that burden alone, just as they both agreed upon from before the creation of the world.

And the weight of that question on top of the emotion of the moment was almost too much for me to bear, standing there at RDU airport, waving to my kids as they pass through the scanners, the military family hugging and laughing behind me flooding me with my own military family memories, and the cry of Jesus abandonment ringing in my head.

I wasn't abandoning my kids, but I was sending them off. Somehow with the convergence of the family behind me and the cry of Jesus from the Scriptures, my send off felt more loaded. I became conflicted and melancholy.

But the Lord was good to stop me. "This question isn't for you," the Lord said. "I bore this question so that you wouldn't have to." Clarity began to peek through the fog.

Jesus had born the separation from our Father on our behalf. He did this so that we might have our own re-uniting with God. Jesus is abandoned so that we might never be abandoned ever again. We, too, can shriek, "Daddy! Daddy!" and run into our good Father's arms, free of guilt and shame.

This question of abandonment is joyfully off limits for me. I'm not to locate myself either on the "abandoning" side or on the "been abandoned side." Jesus asks the question of abandonment so that we never have to ever again.

I drove home in the eerily quiet mini-van considering all of this. "Do you know this, Alex?" I heard him ask me, "do you know that I'll never leave you? Do you know that we'll always be together--always, for eternity?"

Yes, Lord. I know that. Forgive me for forgetting. Forgive me for living as if it weren't true.

"Tell them," I heard him say. "Tell them that I love them. Tell them that I was separated so that they will never, ever, ever have to be. Tell them."