But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.
— Luke 15:20
“I hate you. I hate you!” my daughter screams from behind her door. Her words cut me, but this is hardly the first tantrum that we’ve weathered. I stand outside, deaf to the sound of kicks and screams. They used to break me inside; familiarity has numbed their sting.
“Let. Me. Out!” She punctuates every word with a pound of her fist against the door. This is her mantra, her fit of rage. I listen but I don’t respond. In her anger, she has forgotten the truth: I am waiting for her outside.
The door isn’t locked.
If she chose, she could walk back into my arms at any time. Instead, my prodigal daughter sits and stews in the fumes of her own fury.
This is where I vacillate as a parent. I waver between wanting to tow the hard line of justice and wanting to embrace her with arms of mercy. I want her to learn her lesson, to have the discipline to calm down and sort through her feelings and transgressions in a productive way. I want her to seek reconciliation. At the same time, I feel for her. I know the paralysis of the fear of rejection, even as an adult woman. I want to reach in, salve her pain, and help her breathe again.
On this day, when the screaming quiets, I walk through her door and scoop her up. Today, her hands do not push me away. Today, she crumples against me. The stiffness of fear and anger are gone. Her tiny hands clasp around my neck as she lets her head fall against my chest. When she is through soaking up affection and reassurance, she is ready to take my hand and walk out of her room. No, the door was never locked. Still, she needed a tangible sign to walk back through it.
This is the gift of confession, that tangible sign of the grace God offers us. We are never locked out. But, sometimes, we allow ourselves to be locked in by our own fears and shame. We let Satan twist us up on ourselves, sometimes so much that we blame God for the isolation we feel. We convince ourselves that it isn’t even us who have done wrong.
God is unfair and his rules are outdated. We ignore him. We pretend not to be hurt by consuming the things we know will consume us. We build our own prison walls, and then rail against God when we realize how trapped we’ve become.
There is an old tale of monkey-trapping in which a small piece of fruit is placed in a vessel with a long, small neck. The fruit is small enough to fit down there, but large enough that the opening becomes too tight for the fruit to be withdrawn once the monkey wraps his hand around it. There is nothing stopping the monkey from releasing the fruit and walking away. He remains trapped only as long as he refuses to let go of the fruit.
We imprison ourselves with our unwillingness to let go. We are trapped by the illusion of being trapped, locked in only because we are unwilling to try the handle and walk out of the darkness. Many times, freedom is not this easy and our pain is not something we can simply walk away from.
But sometimes, it is.
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Sometimes it really is as easy as just walking away from it. One morning, I was looking to see if the darkness was still going to consume me as I entered my prayer room, and gently God spoke to my heart, and said “ stop looking for the darkness and just look at me.”
I was absolutely amazed at how simple this was, and it changed me from that moment on.