Monica's Thirty-Year Vigil

In the fourth century, a North African mother named Monica watched her brilliant son Augustine abandon everything she had taught him. He took a concubine at seventeen, fathered a child out of wedlock, and embraced the Manichaean heresy — a belief system that contradicted every prayer she had whispered over his cradle in Thagaste.

Monica followed him. When Augustine secretly boarded a ship for Rome to escape her influence, she pursued him across the Mediterranean. When he moved to Milan, she moved to Milan. For nearly thirty years, she prayed with a persistence that baffled everyone around her. A bishop in Carthage, weary of her pleading for his intervention, finally told her, "Go your way. As sure as you live, it is impossible that the son of these tears should perish."

She could not give him up. Her heart would not let her.

This is the exact ache the Almighty voices through Hosea. "How can I give you up, Ephraim?" God taught Israel to walk, lifted them to His cheek, bent down to feed them — and they turned to other gods anyway. Yet His compassion was aroused. He would not unleash His fierce anger, because He is God and not a man, the Holy One whose love outlasts every rebellion.

Monica lived to see Augustine baptized in Milan, weeping at the font. God's parental love does not keep a ledger. It keeps a light burning.