It feels like I’m standing at a gate, waitng for it to open. When the gate opens, the man/child, my offspring, will enter through the gates and I will be there at the gate as it closes behind him. I can see him. If I strain and squint, I may get a glimpse of him as he carries on with his new life.

I want to shout out and get his attention but I won’t because he musn’t be distracted. We have been waiting and preparing for this all his life. This is what he wants to do and this is where God has led him.

Perhaps from time to time he will come back to the gate to hand me his laundry or maybe even ask for financial assistance. He may even talk to me and ask for my input on some question he is struggling with. I will welcome those times.

I realize now that the hesitation I feel is due to the fact that whatever happens to him while he is at the university, what relationships he will choose to nurture will be his choice to make. If he wishes to continue including his parents in his life then that is a choice he will have to make. He has become an interesting person– I want to keep him close to me. I’ve grown to like him, you see, apart from loving him because he is mine. I really enjoy his company and I crave it. I have treasured his friendship.

Now is the time when, armed with all that he has thus learned fro me, all that I have wittingly and unwittingly taught him, he goes off to earn his place in the world. He has to be left alone to figure out what he wants to be, where he wants to go and how he will go about it. This is a time I will see if I had raised him well.

He will no longer be fully accountable to me–he will be accountable to himself as well as to the God he believes in. It may be that he will leave behind the God he has known from his  childhood and go and worship other gods less worthy. That is my fear as well as his  choice.

I will respect his choice although I prefer for me and my house to serve the True and the Living God of the Scripture. In the end, I have trained him and led him toward submission and surrender to God. I have led my child to the altar but I ccould not make him live a life of surrender to God. To choose to submit to God will be his choice to make. I can only pray that he makes the right choice–surrender to God is always the right choice.

In the meantime, we are still together, busy closing the book on high school and busy preparing for entering university. I have set aside a time for prayer especially for him as I have set aside time to pray for my woman/child who is on the wings and is about to embark on the same process of advancement to the next level just like her brother. This is all that a mother with grown children can do–pray for her children that they will lead lives that will glorify God and at they will work for things that will last for eternity. May God’s will be done in their lives. May Christ be their Lord and not only their Savior. May the lives they lead be well pleasing to God.