Imagine the scene.

I was walking down the aisles in the local Kroger, minding my own business. It was early September many years ago and I had ten thousand things running through my brain as I shopped. “Get broccoli/what time is that meeting tomorrow/don’t forget cream cheese/need to work on my sermon tonight” … and I unknowingly turned the corner and headed down the bread aisle. I found myself in front of the Little Debbie snack display, and my unconscious brain kicked in a shopping list reminder: “Oatmeal Creams for Jamie. Swiss Rolls for Sarah.”

I stopped my cart to search for these items, was immediately overwhelmed with a tidal wave of grief. I felt the uprising of hot tears as I realized that there are no kids at my house that require stocking up on school lunch items anymore. My youngest had just joined her sister at college days earlier, and I was now an empty nester.

Lord, I detest that label.

These life transitions for parents can be extraordinarily painful. The journey from preschool to Kindergarten, where you can’t fathom your child on the bus with the big kids, is quickly replaced by them leaving the security of Elementary School for the wildness of Middle School. A day later they’re in High School and then a prom or two later, off to college. Before you know it, they’re gone.

Eventually they have the nerve to leave home forever to start a career, marry someone, or live in another state. Had I fully understood that having children would be a series of letting go that gets harder each time, I might have just skipped over having kids and gone right to being a Nana. Too bad that isn’t an option.

This back-to-school time of year brings back all those tender “see-ya’s” and “come home soons.” I’m watching parents every Sunday as they move slowly into the reality of their impending school separations. College kids are already moving into their dorms this week and their hollow-eyed parents are trying to live into their new normal. It’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion. I see the impact coming, I want to warn them away, but I can’t stop looking, and I can’t do anything to help them.

These parents are sitting on the same pew as a man who is desperately gripping the back of the pew in front of him, hoping to remain standing on the first Sunday in 61 years that his wife will not beside him. Across the aisle is a young mother soothing her two young children and wondering how in the world they will survive her husband’s sudden and abrupt departure from their marriage and their home. I see the woman behind her tearing up at the mention of losing a loved one. It is the seventh anniversary of her father’s death.

Everyone has lost someone. Life is a process of saying goodbye to places, things, and people we love. Where can we go when our hearts are broken?

Psalm 147

The Lord builds up Jerusalem;
    he gathers the exiles of Israel.
He heals the brokenhearted
    and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of the stars
    and calls them each by name.
Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
    his understanding has no limit.

Sing to the Lord with grateful praise;
    make music to our God on the harp.

The psalmist makes a bold and life-sustaining claim that the God who ordered the number of the stars in the sky sees your hurt and knows your pain. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Even in these painful moments of letting go, God is with us and his love sustains us.

What does that mean to you today? We are invited to take every wound to Jesus, our Wounded Healer. He will bind up our hurts and gather us up, no matter what exile or desert we are walking through.

This may actually be the greatest power of the incarnation. By becoming human, God as Jesus walked the painful paths that we walk. He experienced hurt and his heart was also broken. He watched Judas betray him and then he himself left people he loved. Like you, he also had to let go of people he loved and places he cherished. He gets it. He gets us. Glory to God, we are known and understood by our great and powerful God.

And parents of departing students, you’ll get through it, I promise. I did, and lived to tell about it. And soon enough it will be December and they’ll be back with a ton of stories, experiences, and lots of dirty laundry. Thanks be to God!

Childhood’s Sunset by Michelle Robertson