"It cannot be that the son of these tears..."

On the love of the Lord for wayward ones

Feb 14, 2025

Hi friends!

It’s been a minute, eh? Thanks so much for all the kind notes and encouragements as I plug along working on the Augustine book. (See HERE if you missed that one.)

The process has been super fun. I’ve known and loved Auggie’s work for a long time, but the opportunity to do a deeper dive, to read him more closely and carefully and prayerfully has been really enriching. I’m astonished how often I find myself waylaid by emotion as he tells his story.

One such—offered as an encouragement for those of you (that is, all of us) who are connected to wayward loved ones:

Augustine was a hot mess as a teenager. His friends were mostly idiots and ruffians. His own behavior was often appalling. His rampant sexual desire had him constantly tossed about. Oh, and he joined a cult.

Can you imagine being this guy’s parent? Sheesh. Actually, some of you have kids just like this. So you have some idea of what this was all like for Augustine’s mother Monica—a good woman, full of faith in God and concern for her son. There’s a playbook for this. And it goes something like the following:

First, you admonish, in various degrees of severity, your loved one. Hopefully this works to turn the tide.

If it doesn’t, secondly, you turn to prayer, hoping that God will bring about the change you were not able to bring about.

If those things fail, what do you do next? You talk to your pastor and see if he or she can talk to your loved one. Maybe a third party, a spiritual authority, will do the trick, eh? (Oh, the emails I could show you…)

The first two having (seemingly) failed, Monica does just that. Goes to a local bishop—a good man, well-versed in Scripture, with a reputation for helping wayward ones find their way home to God. She appeals to him to do for Augustine what he had done for so many others.

To her astonishment and dismay, he declines. “He told her,” Augustine recounts, “that I was still unripe for instruction because, as she had told him, I was brimming over with the novelty of the heresy.” He throws her back into step #2, saying, “Leave him alone. Just pray to God for him.”

Monica is absolutely distraught. The unfairness of it. “Unripe for instruction?” How can he know that? And why won’t he at least give it a shot—for nothing else than out of compassion for a distressed mother! Callous, cold-hearted man!

She appeals to him again, and this time he responds curtly, and yet… with deep wisdom and an understanding of the heart of God:

“Leave me and go in peace,” he says, for “it cannot be that the son of these tears should be lost…”

Now let that line linger with you for a moment.

And of course we know the end of the story: grace leads Augustine home, if by a long and circuitous route. Monica said later, “I took his words as a message from heaven.” It would be nine more (for Monica, excruciating) years before the Lord’s converting work in Augustine would come to term—but come to term it would. In the Lord’s way, in the Lord’s time, the “son of tears” came home.

(The story is told in Book 3 Chapter 12, fyi.)

As a pastor, I run into this one all the time: the wounds we feel in our spirits when those we love are far from Home. We plead with them. We pray. And then, usually, we scheme to try to bring about the outcome we desire.

I get it. I have those people in my life too. I’ve done the same thing. So many times.

But, you know, God brings salvation; not us. The Spirit convicts; not us. The Son sojourns into the Far Country for the lost ones; not us. There are depths in the human heart that humans cannot reach. Only God can; only God, whispering the depths.

And at some point in the process, we must come to recognize that. That our tears are but a drop in the ocean of God’s own ache for the wayward ones, that they are a participation in the Divine weeping; that the Son and Spirit go with and intercede for the lost ones, and that—here’s a thought to wreck your theology in all the right ways—no intercession of the Son and Spirit will finally go unanswered by the Father whose children the lost ones are.

So, if that is you; if your spirit is bleeding right now with wounds of love for wayward ones, then I say to you: let that wise bishop’s 1600-year-old words be the living Word of God to you today: