They said it would be easier with the second child.

They lied.

Our weepy good-byes to Sam prove that we're still no good at this.

Life can be seen as a progression through a series of stages, from childhood to adolescence, to early adulthood, to mature adulthood. I have enjoyed every phase of life as far back as I can remember. But I've never wanted to go back. I loved early, pre-school childhood. I cried every day for weeks when I started grammar school. After Christmas and summer vacations, I'd cry again the first Monday back at school, more than once wheeling my bike around before getting to the end of the block, and heading back home in tears, to a home I didn't want to outgrow.

But by the 6^th grade I loved grammar school life and regretted its passing. I loved the 9^th grade of junior high, and mourned its end and the arrival of scary 10^th grade at Phineas Banning High School. So it went with high school, college, seminary, internship, ministry, marriage, and the arrival of children. I have loved each stage and lamented its end, even as I grew to love the succeeding stage.

Yet I have never wanted to go back. I was sad when my teens ended. But I never wanted to relive the teenage years. Who would? I loved seminary study, but didn't want to do it over again. But this latest stage, the dropping off your children at college stage, is different. It signals that life's major task is now almost over. We only rear our children once. In many ways everything leads up to our child-rearing years and everything else looks back on them. The primary job that God has given us to do (as a covenant community as well as families) is to be fruitful and multiply, to bring children into the world into whose hands the torch can be placed to continue the work of subduing the earth to the glory of God. I don't want these days to end. I want to go back to the days when our house was full of our five loud, energetic, school-aged children.

"Being a grandparent is more enjoyable than being a parent," I've been told. Maybe so. Still, the pathos in the Johnson home is deep. Sam's piano has been the background music for our family. We have delighted in his emotive style of playing, whether the music was classical, jazz, or church music. The silence since he has left is deafening. Just before we left for Wofford College on Monday morning (August 25) he went back to the piano one more time and played, "Softly and Tenderly" and "Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross." Call it the straw that broke the camel's back. We're just not good at this.

It is gratifying for a parent to see younger sisters weep as they say goodbye to their older brother, but it is also heart-wrenching. I love that they love him. Sally doesn't know what it means to go to school without Sam. And she doesn't want to. For Ben, with two brothers gone, "this will be the worst fall ever." He doesn't know life without two big brothers to look up to.

Sam and Drew have both settled in at college and are studying, making friends, and playing football. Drew's thumb injury has knocked him out for the season. Sam, on the other hand, after missing August football camp and walking on in early September, within 2 weeks made the 60-man travel team, got in for one play against SEC opponent South Carolina, and is starting on special teams.

Families fight and fuss and presume on each other and "take each other for advantage," as we say in our house. But when we are deprived of each other, then we realize most clearly how profound, how deep, how mysterious our love for each other is. For the first time I not only don't want it to end. I want to freeze the present. No, I want to go back.