Watching, Not Waiting

What do you do when you love someone you can’t fix? When help and harm look almost identical, and you don’t know which one you’re offering?

And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.
— Luke 15:20 NKJV

The father in this story let his son go, let him face the consequences of his own choices, and watched him walk away into a life that would cost him everything. That kind of love respected his son’s choices while never letting go of hope.

Jerome from Kansas knows this tension firsthand. “We have an estranged daughter that has gone through some addiction issues,” he says. “We don’t know how to handle it, but have found strength with God. We try not to enable her but to help her.”

That’s the same posture as the father in Luke 15—present, ready, but not standing in the way of the consequences his daughter needs to face.

Love doesn’t have to choose between helping and enabling—it can hold a boundary and an open door at the same time.

Notice what the father was doing while his son was gone: watching. The text says he saw his son “when he was still a great way off”—meaning he hadn’t stopped looking. He stayed ready every single day, so that when the moment came, he could respond instantly with compassion instead of resentment.

That’s a different kind of strength than fixing the problem yourself. It’s the strength to keep loving someone through a season you can’t control, to set boundaries without closing the door, and to trust God with an outcome only He can bring about.

Jerome and his wife are loving actively, the way the father did, by staying ready and refusing to let go of hope. That’s costly love, and it’s still love.

Today’s One Thing
If you’re carrying a relationship like this, bring it to God specifically today. Ask Him for wisdom to know the difference between helping and enabling, and ask Him to strengthen you to stay ready, the way the father did.

Go Deeper

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