From the Bishop

Taking Andy to college

	In order to receive what is coming,
	what has been must be let go of.

I cried the day we found out that a baby boy seven thousand miles away in Korea had been placed in our home.  I cried the day I took him to kindergarten.  It surprised me, but I cried again on his first day of high school. It did not surprise me that I would cry at taking Andrew to college for the first time.

The trip to move him into his dorm room far from home had been on my mind for a long time.  I hardly noticed his senior year in high school in some ways, so focused was I on the separation that lay at the end of it.  For months before, I would cry every time the CD in my car would play “Puff the Magic Dragon” and get to the line about “dragons live forever, but not so little boys.”  I spent Andrew’s last year in high school grieving the relationship with my little boy that I knew was going to end.  It was, I had known from the day we brought him home, inevitable.  It is just that it was no longer far away. 

We left late one afternoon in August and drove the 300 miles or so to Oxford, Georgia.  I’m sure we got such a late start because I was looking for excuses to put it off.  I found myself reluctant to cross the Georgia state line and considered spending the night in Chattanooga to make it all seem more distant than it was.  But in the end, we drove on, arriving in Oxford around 1:00 in the morning, too tired to do anything but go to sleep.  Too ready for sleep to think much about the next day.

As we had been advised, we arrived at the dorm early the next morning and unloaded his belongings into what seemed too small a space.  How to arrange the furniture was a challenge.  Not that there was that much furniture.  But if you placed the beds a certain way, you couldn’t open the closet door.  And if the desks were not just so, their drawers were blocked.  We solved that jigsaw puzzle.  I was grateful for its distraction.

And then, to my great surprise really, as I had sworn to myself that I would not do this, I unpacked him.  I neatly folded every pair of pants and every tee shirt and placed them in his drawers.  I organized his socks.  I made his bed.  I found myself wanting to make sure he had Band-Aids and aspirin and cough medicine in case he got sick.   I told myself that it was because his mother would want me to and would surely ask about it when I got home.  I knew better.

There were the orientation events.  One mother told about her experiences with her daughter who had been a freshman the year before.  She cried a lot.  I found that particularly unhelpful.  But on the whole, the sessions put off the inevitable good-bye.  For that I was grateful.

Finally, though, the time came.  There was no more underwear to fold.  He walked me to the car.  I worked hard not to embarrass him.  I did not want him to see me cry.  And I didn’t.  Until he was safely back in the dorm and I was at the end of the parking lot.  And I cried, sobbed really, from there, through the little town of Oxford, and back to the interstate, and really for the first 30 miles or so.  And then I cried sporadically all the way home.  And when I got to Chattanooga, I stopped and spent the night.

But Jesus said something else about when things are dying.  He said that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  In order for new life to emerge, something of the old life has to die.  In order to receive what is coming, what has been must be let go of. 

I visited my college student son not too long ago.  He emerged this time from his dorm with the smile I have always so loved in him.  He hugged me.  And when I went into his dorm room, I noticed that he had printed a picture of his whole family, even his little brother, from the diocesan web site and put it on his bulletin board.  “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Agape,

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