Musings over Broken Ropes

I was already in bed but I could hear the sounds of my grown son and his friends and wife playing on the horsy tire swing in our backyard. Their laughter was lulling me to sleep when I heard a scream, some muffled concerned rumbles of voices, and then silence. Then I heard the footsteps on the back porch and my teen daughter, Asherel's voice, "That's ok."

I knew then that the rope to the tire swing must have broken. The rope is easily 50 feet long tied to a very high branch of an oak tree. When we had tree work done many years ago, the tree climbers had put it up for us. I could tell from the mumbled voices that no one had been hurt (at least seriously) and I was glad it had come down with an adult, and not a small child sailing as high as an exuberant adult could push her.

It made me consider the connections in life, the ones that seem they will be safe and strong forever. That is not always the case. Sometimes time and stress can snap the sturdiest of ties. Which broke away, I thought, gazing at the horse swing crumpled on the ground? Had the horse pulled away from the tree, or the tree relinquished its hold on the horse? Or was it a mutual parting of the ways?

And since it was Mother's Day, I thought about children, and the hold a mother has on her children. Children grow up and move away, but does the tie holding them need to be broken? Couldn't it just stretch perhaps thinner no matter how far they might stray? Does it have to be severed completely? How does a child become an adult, with all the independence necessary, all the freedom needed to develop all the character he will need in a brutal world ... and still remember that the ties back to his mom were once the very things that helped him soar, like riding our horse swing under the strong, supportive arm of the tree?

I suspect every child responds to that differently. But I know every mother clings to the same hope. It is the same hope I had as I looked out at the broken swing. If the rope breaks, the child will remember so fondly the days when he would swing for hours under the leafy arbor of the tree that he will one day gather a new rope, a different rope that won't break, and return the swing to the place from which it had fallen. Maybe not because he himself wants to swing anymore; perhaps he has grown beyond that. But the memories of the swing are so precious and the gratitude to the old tree so immense that he too longs to return to it, and remember how it once supported his first eager flights over the endless horizons.

God was the perfect parent, yet His children strayed. And the descendants of Adam and Eve continued that willful severing of the most important relationship of all- the created from their creator. Still, God promises us repeatedly in scripture that when we recognize how our sin has detached us from our Heavenly Father, He will still be there, like the tree in our yard, eager and longing for us to return, to swing again in the shade of His branches.

None of us ever are too old to swing quietly in the shade of a tree, I think. Today, I want to find a lower branch, one I can reach, and a sturdier rope, and put the swing back up so it is always ready for the child, should he return.

Jeremiah 31: 17-20
So there is hope for your descendants,"
declares the Lord.
"Your children will return to their own land. "I have surely heard Ephraim's moaning:
'You disciplined me like an unruly calf,
and I have been disciplined.
Restore me, and I will return,
because you are the Lord my God. After I strayed,
I repented;
after I came to understand,
I beat my breast.
I was ashamed and humiliated
because I bore the disgrace of my youth.' Is not Ephraim my dear son,
the child in whom I delight?
Though I often speak against him,
I still remember him.
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I have great compassion for him,"
declares the Lord.

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