The Cellist Who Came Back Different

In 1987, a seventeen-year-old named David Kim left his family's dry cleaning shop in Flushing, Queens, after a bitter argument with his father. His father had wanted him to take over the business. David wanted to play cello. He packed a duffel bag and caught a Greyhound to Chicago, and for three years his father refused to speak his name.

What David's father could not see from behind the steam presses was that those years of separation were reshaping everything. David studied under a master teacher, played in small orchestras, and eventually earned a chair with the Chicago Symphony. When he finally returned to Flushing for his mother's sixtieth birthday, he did not come back as the rebellious teenager who had slammed the door. He came back as a man his father could respect — not as the son who owed him labor, but as someone whose absence had forged a new kind of relationship between them. His father wept at the kitchen table and said, "I lost a worker. I gained a son."

Paul saw the same divine arithmetic in Onesimus. Perhaps, he told Philemon, this painful departure happened so that you could receive him back — not as property, but as a beloved brother. God does not waste our separations. He redeems them into reunions we never could have imagined.