Sorrows of a parent... Horns and Halos, p.145  love refused,  parent's love

In a western town lived a preacher whose son grew up tall and straight, with a mind keen and clean and wholesome. In the same town lived a foul-mouthed, atheistic, and very brilliant doctor. A strong friendship grew up between the two.

The doctor, with his brilliant mind, became a hero to the boy, and gradually there came an estrangement in the preacher's home. Under the father's roof the boy was irritable and unmanageable, contemptuous of his father's faith, resentful of even his mother's kindly concern. And wherever the interest of his father came into conflict with the interest of his friend, the boy consistently chose the latter's way and soon came almost completely under the spell of his atheistic hero, so much so that the people of the church shook their heads sadly and said, "He is getting more like the doctor than like his father. He is more the doctor's son than the son of his own father."

One midnight the preacher, with a heavy heart, stole softly into the bedroom of his son, to find the air filled with fumes of alcohol, and the boy's mother kneeling by his bed, stroking his hair, kissing his forehead, caressing him. Looking up through the veil of tears, she said, "He won't let me love him when he's awake.

That is one of the dominant notes of Scripture, from the first Book, in which you hear God say, "Adam, where art thou?" to the last Book, in which you hear Him say, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." The loneliness of God, the sorrow in God's heart!