The Father Who Kept the Porch Light On

In 1987, a man named Robert Fulghum told the story of a father in Athens, Greece, whose son had run away from home. The father, a shepherd named Stelios, searched every village in the Peloponnese for months. When he finally traced his boy to the city, he found only empty apartments and cold leads. So Stelios did something remarkable. He rented a small room near Monastiraki Square, taped his photograph to the door with a note that read simply: "I am still your father. I am here. Come home." He waited in that room for three years.

Hosea 11:1 peels back the curtain on the heart of God with devastating tenderness: "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son." Notice the tense — not "I commanded him out of Egypt," but "I called." The word carries the ache of a parent standing at the back door at dusk, calling a child's name across the fields.

This is the God who remembered a slave nation sweating under Pharaoh's whip and said, "That one is Mine." The entire book of Hosea throbs with this same stubborn, parental love — a love that watches its children wander toward Baal and foreign altars, yet refuses to stop calling their name. The Almighty does not love Israel because Israel is faithful. He loves because He is Father. And fathers keep the light on.