I grew up in a generation–one of several generations–that was taught to seek out a policeman (and they were almost exclusively men) if we were ever lost or separated from my parents. Oddly, I don’t remember my parents ever giving me that advice.

As an intern minister thirty years ago I taught a course of the old adult RE curriculum Building Your Own Theology. During one session or another, I said with all the convocation and naivete of a new minister and a life-long Unitarian Universalist, “ we don’t have to accept narrow, fundamentalist definitions that deprive us of rich religious language.

Next Monday it will be six years since Judge Robert Docherty of the 5th Judicial Court in Minnesota declared my daughter and me a legal family. For almost two years before that Lucia had been in and out of my home in foster care and respite care. These eight years, from age nine to seventeen, have been marked by a series of lettings-go. From having Lucia physically with me almost every minute she wasn’t at school or camp, to allowing her to spend a few hours home alone in the parsonage.