It’s been eight years now since we’ve taken a picture of the whole family.
Eight years since one daughter walked away from our family circle, taking our grandchildren with her.
The rest of us still gather every year, and at the end of our time together we take a group picture. But now, our pictures include one of us holding her portrait. We do this to remind her, as we remind ourselves, that she is not forgotten. So we gather on the front steps, I take her picture down from the living room wall, and one of us holds it. It is a silent declaration that she is still ours. That she still belongs.
Does she see the pictures I post online, holding her portrait? I don’t know. I suppose it’s like the letters I wrote to our children’s birthparents as they grew. Some received them with joy. Others, I never heard from. But I wrote them anyway.
I share this because I know that our situation is not unusual. Too many families have lost members not to death, but to abandonment. Not due to abuse or dispute, but to some unnamed darkness that has lured them away. If you are in one of those families…..I’m sorry.
But I urge you—keep holding their portrait. Let them see that you still wait, still hope, still pray for a time when they will return to the circle of family they left behind.
There is a God, after all, who holds our portrait. Who waited through rebellion and rejection for us to come to our senses. A Father who longed for us to examine the dry husks of our lives and remember a time of feasting in his house.
He held our portrait and He holds it still, if we are yet wandering in dark alleys of unbelief. He holds it as a reminder and an invitation to come home. Home, where we belong.
I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Lamentations 3:19-23
Andrea Sanborn 
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