It is January and I am again ensconced in South Florida.

This is the annual visit – almost a retreat – to live in my son’s neighborhood and soak up, not so much the sun, but his nearness.

With his invitation my husband and I attend one of his weekly meetings.  It is an otherwise routine weeknight gathering at one of the many churches in this busy city that so generously allow groups like this to gather.

This particular meeting has extra meaning.  He and friends helped to restart it after Covid, and they are regulars.

Men and women slowly file into the room.

They vary in every way. Not just physically, or in what they are wearing, but in their pasts.

Unless they share openly at the podium or in face-to-face conversations later, you’d never know about the horrific lives many have lived before arriving here.

They come to move beyond their former selves.  To find a new life.  To seek a lasting recovery.

I glance at each of them, not wanting to stare.  I wonder about their families, the mothers and fathers who raised them.  Are they still in the lives of these sons and daughters?  From the way they greet me, I cannot tell.

But my eyes are not on them long.

They are on my son.

He is walking through the aisles, letting his hand graze a shoulder or pat a back.  Sometimes he shares a word or two, smiles at an upturned face, nods, offers a laugh, and then moves on to the next.

It’s his touch.  That smile.

It’s his kindness.

In a world that so desperately needs kindness, it can show up anywhere.

Even in a South Florida church on an average weekday evening.

And in the touch of a son.