Room to manuever

“He’s not safe, but he’s good.” C.S. Lewis, British author, from “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”

The news has a way of making one want to invest in a whole lot of bubble wrap. The kinds of quantities found in stores that mail things off. Rolls and rolls and rolls of the stuff.

I see crying teenagers or the parents of the dead and I want to wrap my family in safety, to retreat, to gather inside the circle of home and simply wait. Yet, I cannot do this now any more than I could keep an infant breathing then.

The breathing thing sounds almost silly now, but when our oldest daughter was a baby, it was hard to walk away from her crib at night. “What if she stops breathing?” fear whispered into the darkness of her room. I would stand in the dark, in the silence and pray, knowing no amount of prudent crib usage and body positioning could guarantee such a thing.

I could not keep her breathing. Only God could do that.

That revelation has sustained me through many years of parenting and the occasional panic such risky endeavors inevitably induce. Only God. Only God. Only God. It has a way of echoing louder and louder in a dark room, in a dark world.

So, I leave the room, I stop my ears against fear’s whispers again and again and again, knowing God needs room to maneuver in my children’s lives the way He has in mine. He needs risk. How else can He build their faith and trust? Trust that He can provide, protect, be a shield and sword if that’s what is needed?

It’s true. He needs risk.

“Is he safe?” the Narnian Chronicles character asks concerning the Messiah-like Aslan the Lion. “He’s not safe, but he’s good,” was the fictional and the factual reply.

And, that kind of good is good enough. Only God. Only God. Only God.