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When we parted, a smile had replaced the tears on the face of our son's birth mother. Now it was my turn to cry. Back at home, with him in one arm and an open album she made for him in the other, I shed tears over the tragedy of her love. Despite an intense affection for our son—no, because of such affection—I thought there was something profoundly wrong about his being with us and not with her. In a good world, in a world in which the best things are not sometimes so terribly painful, he and she would delight and thrive in each other's love.

The encounter with our son's birth mother left an indelible mark not so much on my memory as on my character. She helped me articulate what it means to be a good parent. A vision of parenting that was buried under many impressions and opinions emerged clearly on the horizon of my consciousness. I ought to love him the way she loved him, for his own sake, not for mine. I must not pervert my love into possession. I can hold onto him only if I let go of him.

But how can I let go of him whom I long so intensely to hold? The only way I know is by placing him in the arms of the same God from whom we received him. I remembered another deeply pained woman—a woman who suffered not so much because she had to give away her child but because, like my wife and me, she needed a miracle to receive a child. It was Hannah, the mother of Samuel. She was given the child she so desperately desired because she was willing to let go of him (1 Sam. 1:11).

Even those of us who will not set our children before God as a Nazarite, as Hannah did, will love them best if we hold them—in God's arms.

Miroslav Volf is Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. This article first appeared in the Christian Century (Aug. 26–Sept. 2, 1998).

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June 14 1999, Vol. 43, No. 7