There is a detail in the parable of the prodigal son that is easy to read past.
When the son finally turns for home , broke, humiliated, rehearsing the speech he will give, the father sees him while he is still a long way off. This is not a casual glance. You do not see someone at that distance unless you have been looking. The father has been watching the road. Not once. Not occasionally. Every day, for however long the son has been gone, the father has been standing where he can see the horizon. He was hoping, watching, waiting for a figure that did not come.
We do not know how long the son was away. The parable does not tell us. But the father's posture tells us something about the waiting. It was not passive. It was not resigned. It was the daily, costly, unresolved act of a man who refused to stop looking.
There is a kind of waiting that the church does not always know how to honour. The waiting of the parent whose child has walked away, whose phone does not ring, whose Sunday mornings have a particular silence where someone used to sit. It is one of the loneliest griefs I know. It does not resolve on any human schedule. It cannot be hurried by prayer or willed into resolution by faith. It simply has to be carried, day after day, on the road between hope and heartbreak.
The tears that belong to this waiting are real. They are not a failure of faith. They are the evidence of love that has not given up. A love that keeps watching the road even when the road stays empty, love that rehearses the reunion it is not sure will come, love that gets up the next morning and looks again.
Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He wept before he acted. The tears were not the opposite of faith. They were the honest expression of a love that knew exactly what the waiting had cost the people who loved him.
Your tears are not the opposite of hope either.
They are what hope looks like when it has been carrying something heavy for a long time. They are the proof that you have not stopped loving, not stopped watching, not stopped believing that the figure might yet appear on the horizon.
The father ran. The text says he ran. This was undignified for a man of his standing, and he did not care. He covered the distance the son could not cover on his own. He did not wait for the speech. He did not require the repentance to be completed before the embrace began.
The road is long. The horizon may be empty today.
Keep watching.
