A Slippery World

Beloved:

     Sixteen years ago this Sunday, on about as much snow as dusts the streets this morning, my van slid across the center line and hit another car head-on. I called it a terrible day.  My husband said, “Are you kidding me?  You came home to us!”  My left wrist was shattered and I spent the entire winter in a cast.   My kids were 7, 2, and 9 months old.

     That 9-month-old just walked herself out to a car and drove herself to to school.  The same kid I once didn’t let use scissors unsupervised now has keys to a five thousand pound death machine.  I suggested a snow day in bed with books and crayons.  She declined.  Nothing prepared me for the anxiety of my kids driving.  When two or three of them travel together,  I feel like I’m in labor again, remembering just to breathe.  

     Imagine what God must go through every morning. watching us rush about in this slippery world.  We feel so competent, so necessary to the needs of the day.  Yet I wonder if to God we aren’t still toddling around, barely safe from ourselves?  What courage it takes to love one another as God loves us, to love without controlling, without so much interference the other cannot live her life.  What intention it takes to love others so that they are loved and not so we  feel safer.  

Great is the temptation to require my daughter to text me when she arrives at each new destination, to keep constant tab on her safety.  I mostly don’t. She knows I’m anxious so she checks in to reassure me.  I could learn from that, learn to pray more from love than fear, from gratitude than anxiety.  

I pray this beautiful day brings you much love.  ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette