ditched

My son is entering those precarious pre-teen years. 
i say precarious, because it has seemed to me as a mama sometimes that my little ones have been balanced; perched on a tiny mountain peak with their adulthood on one side, and their childhoods on the other.  These years are spent swaying from one side to the other - in a precarious sort of way. 
My son is still so child... with his questioning innocence - and yet his shoulders broaden by the day, and he whispers his deeper thoughts in my ear and i'm left staring at his retreating form as i try to reconcile these man choices with my baby boy. 
The other day he came all storm clouds into my room.  Slamming open the door and flopping angrily onto my bed where i was nursing his baby brother. 
His face was awash in anger, but i saw just the slightest quake in his lip and the tears threatening to spill - and i recognized sadness too. 
i tried to ignore his black feet on my white comforter as he explained to me that he had been ditched. 
"And i'm mad at him..." His man-child mind had been made, and there was a hurt fury i have seldom seen in this boy. 
"Oh, buddy - you don't have to be mad.  You can choose to be the bigger man - to forgive and to believe the best of your friend..." i pause - watching him rub the summer sweat from his tomato red face. 
He is my child of conscience, my lover of justice - he listens to the Still Small Voice - and feels his conviction deep. 
"Maybe i misunderstood." His response is immediate, "Maybe he got called in to lunch and i missed it.  Maybe i should give him another chance..."
And i see in the softness around his brow - that it pains less deep to offer up his anger to the One who gives forgiveness free. 
And i see in my son's face - neither man nor child - but servant of the King.

Oh Father, do your work in my children - claim them as Yours.  
Negate all my insufficiency - and let them find sufficiency in Your gentle prompting.