Parental Musings of the Easter Season

Having a child is amazing; amazing simply because as a parent, that child is yours. As a parent, I get to love, cherish, guide, and discipline my beautiful daughter that I carried for nine months and then went through labor in order to bring into the world. Absolutely amazing.
Since this is my first year as a parent through the week of Christ's death and resurrection, I seem to be feeling things differently. The idea of God the Father watching his son endure pain and torment on the cross takes on a whole new meaning. As a parent, I hate it, absolutely despise it, when Anika is in pain. The pain can be as little as a slight bump of her head or more extreme like getting her finger pinched by her carset buckle. To see her face look up at me, tears forming in her eyes, beginning to cry as if to beg me, "Make the pain stop, Mommy. I am hurt and I need you to help me," makes me ache for her. Of course I wish that at my touch, the pain would be instantly gone and she would immediately smile and be ready to play again, the feeling of pain a forgotten experience. All I can do is hold her, rub her back, murmur sweet expressions of my love for her and how everything will be okay in a moment, that the pain will not last.
How tragic a day was the cross for our Father God to watch his son, his only son, go through the physical agony of crucifixion and the spiritual agony of hell. For God to choose to do nothing to help his son, to decide not to send any sort of comforting words, to remain silent when Jesus looked up into heaven, searching for his Father's face and cry, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus knew that at any moment the Father could have ended his son's pain, make it instantly vanish.
How could God have done it? How could he forsake his own son and put him through that pain?
God turned his face away from his son and looked upon his daughter: Joelle Dawn Riezebos. He looked away from one child in order to save millions of his children, including me, from crying out from eternal pain and suffering apart from Him.
God must have focused on me, and the glory that awaited Jesus after enduring all this pain, or how else could a Father watch his child suffer? I am forever grateful that God is my father, for the sake of the son, and that he did allow his son to die for me so that I might be with Him.
Hallelujah!