Dangerous Encounters

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. - Isaiah 41:10

My family lives in a rural area where we share our dwelling space with wild animals. We routinely wait for mule deer to move so we can pull into the driveway. Over time, the sound of coyotes howling in the night stopped pulling us out of our slumber. We learned little tricks to make life with our land-mates more successful, including the installation of high-frequency devices that minimize eight-legged visitors.

When we first moved in, we would regularly go to the lower level of our ranch-style house and be greeted by fifteen to twenty European house spiders in the hallway. These “intruders” are venom-free, but creepy all the same. And despite their harmless nature, we were relieved to find a device that kept most of them out of the house.

Unfortunately, not all of the spiders we live with are safe. Occasionally a deadly, venomous black widow finds its way in. We know where they wriggle into our home, so we monitor that area diligently, and regularly spray an insecticide around the perimeter of the house.

Last week, we busily prepared our yard for a big Mother’s Day celebration. After being neglected all winter, the yard needed a lot of attention. My husband recruited our daughters to help by loading some small rocks into a wheelbarrow so he could roll them away.

That night, my six-year-old crawled into my bed around 4 am saying she couldn’t sleep due to bad dreams about spiders. I asked if she had seen a spider recently, and she affirmed that three shiny black arachnids lurked under the rocks the girls moved earlier in the day. In our yard, we only have one type of shiny black spider – black widows.

A sick twist grew in the pit of my stomach as she relayed the details of finding the spiders. She and her sister hadn’t seen one in quite a while and didn’t recognize them as dangerous. In their ignorance, they didn’t think to tell anyone. Horrible thoughts invaded my mind as I pictured my babies sitting face to face with death. My older daughter smooshed one with a rock. Thinking of her getting that close made me want to throw up.

But then a wave of peace washed over me as I remembered that I am not the only one who loves my girls and works like crazy to protect them. Their Father safeguards them better than I ever could. Whether I am there or not, He always has them in His sight. I cannot protect them from every danger the world throws their way, and reality shows me that God will not. But their safety is out of my control more often than I like to admit, and I am thankful that they are sheltered in the very best hands.

Coincidently, I have had a few conversations this week with people paralyzed by different fears. They are well-founded, rational concerns, rooted in real-life troubles. However, we tend to respond to fear with knee-jerk reactions (like my initial response to the black widow incident, which was, “Let’s sell the house and get away from these blasted bugs!”).

The most we can do to avoid disaster is to take proper precautions (like reminding the girls to stay away from shiny black things), use common sense to the best of our abilities, and trust God. We cannot live in constant fear of what might happen, or let the unknown dictate how we go through our days. Living in fear means we’re not living in faith.

What fears are you or your kids facing right now? What can you turn over to God in trust?

Selective Hearing

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” – Proverbs 3:5

Yesterday, Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of the Lenten season of forty days leading to Easter. My daughters attended a church service with me last night while my husband played in the praise band.

The service was advertised as a “family” service, which to me meant it would be geared toward kids with a message the younger crowd could appreciate. Imagine my surprise when the sermon was about David’s adulterous encounter with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. I never would have guessed that church would be where my children learned the word “affair.” I also didn’t think it would be the place where they would find out babies don’t always come after marriage, the way I have implied. When we got to the car, I asked my kids what they thought about the service. Thankfully, they both agreed that they didn’t understand a lot of it because “the guy talking used too many big words.” Whew, maybe we dodged a couple of bullets there.

However, despite her lack of understanding some vocabulary, the Lord still used that service to work a transformation in my eight-year-old’s heart. The whole way home she happily chattered on about how she had gotten out of the habit of reading the Bible every day and wanted to resume the discipline. She asked if we could read from the Bible before dinner each night during Lent, and if she could start getting up earlier in the morning to have time to pray or work through her devotional guide. She asked if it was okay to pray at school. She also expressed her sadness for a girl who doesn’t know Jesus, and said she wanted to tell her friend about Him at recess. Clearly, while I was worrying about what was said in the service, God was speaking to her in an entirely different way.

I love that about God. I find it fascinating that He can lead two people in the same worship service to hear two entirely different things. My oldest daughter left the service on fire, I left trying to figure out how I would explain some of the speaker’s more colorful descriptions of David’s behavior, and my youngest left wondering how long it would be before she could get home and into bed. She also wanted to know why everyone had ashes on their foreheads. The same experience left us in different emotional states and fueled unique responses in how to move forward in faith.

This experience has me feeling a bit more confident in sending my daughter out into the world at large. While I believe it is important to let kids enjoy the innocence of youth and to shield young children from some of the harsher realities of life, I can now see that I am not alone in this effort. God is obviously at work in filling her ears with what He has to say, protecting her from things she doesn’t need to hear. That doesn’t mean she is oblivious to the four-letter words that float around the third grade, or the way her peers all giggle at the word “sex,” but I trust that God can temper her understanding of these things until she is developmentally ready for them.

Have you ever had an experience where someone at church gave your child more information than you hoped? What was the result of this?