The Father Who Kept the First Drawing

In 2014, a journalist interviewing retired schoolteacher Margaret Ellison in Savannah, Georgia, noticed something peculiar on her refrigerator. Pinned beneath a magnet was a crayon drawing — a wobbly stick figure with orange hair and the word "MOM" scrawled in backward letters. The paper had yellowed. The tape had been replaced dozens of times. "My son Drew made that when he was four," Margaret said. Drew was forty-six. He had not called in three years. He had moved to Seattle, married, divorced, remarried, and never once invited her to visit. Yet every morning, Margaret touched that drawing before she made her coffee. "He doesn't remember making it," she said. "But I remember everything. I remember teaching his hand to hold the crayon."

Hosea 11:1 opens with that same aching tenderness: "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son." God speaks here not as judge or king but as parent — the One who bent down to lift a toddler nation out of slavery, who guided their first stumbling steps through the wilderness. The Hebrew word for "called" carries the intimacy of a father kneeling in a doorway, arms open, coaxing a child to walk toward him. Israel would grow up and turn away. But the Almighty never took the drawing off the refrigerator. He remembered everything — especially the love that came first.