But life has organized it that, without a volunteering from them, I am not to know as much right now. It is new. It is difficult. But, something also seems right about it.
When your kids are off to college and you wish you knew more details about their lives, but can't, it leaves you off at a door in a new neighborhood of something.... You have to walk through the door of a deeper kind of trust. When you can't find the normal ways to know or control something, you have to give up trying the old ways and wait for something new. And, you have to acknowledge that there is something purposeful about the not-knowing.
In this case, I have to give my kids...to life. To give them in a new way to God...to take care of them...to lead them...to wait for them to learn to trust Him in deeper ways. I can't know or nudge the way I want to any more; I can only entrust. I have to entrust myself to Him, as much as I entrust them.
As I recently prayed for them early one morning about this, I believe God answered me this way, "The time has come...to believe in a new way that they are in my good hands. It's now more about me and them, than you and them. Trust me."
I felt kind of sad for the comfort of the familiarity of the old doors. But, also relieved by the fresh paint on the doors of the new neighborhood -- they are even more deeply in the hands of a good God...less of me, more of Him. They need to grow now in another yard, than my own. It is good for them to see and grow in the sun out from under the shade of my branches. They need to learn what they need to learn...and with some distance now, away from me.
I wonder what they will do without my presence, without my promptings. I wonder how they will feel their way, how they will recognize that they are feeling for God. I wonder how God will continue His saving work in them.
I want to know. I will know, but probably more through the lens of the future than right now. The time has come to give my kids...to life, both to what they pursue in it and to what it does to them. And, though unsettling without direct knowledge of their well-being, it seems right. Trusting God always is.
