It’s Okay, I Trust You!

2/23/2022 –  “It’s Okay, I Trust You!”

Out of their innocence, little children are so profound and often wise. One day

when preschool classes were over, I was waiting with one last little boy for his mother to pick him up. We were standing at the edge of the parking lot where there were still many remaining, tempting little piles of filthy snow and ice leftover from a previous storm. This little boy was bored, so he pulled his knitted hat down over his eyes and proceeded to climb, blind, on a large ice hill, yelling, “Hey, look at me!” As I ran over to him to pull his hat off of his eyes, saying, “That’s not safe, you need to get down,” he called out, “No, no, It’s okay! I trust you!”

Wait…WHAT?? The other parents standing around caught the humor and laughed, and so did I; but there was something so much deeper in what he said. How wonderful to know that someone who loves you is always, unfailingly, in control and won’t let anything bad happen to you, no matter what mistakes you make or what you want to try.

Yes, how wonderful, and yet, dangerous. I was so warmed by the fact that he thought he could trust me, even though he hopped over the border into presumption. I am only human and can only leap so far to catch a child in mid-air. However, I thought, “Do I, have the capacity to have the faith of a child and trust that blindly? One minute this little boy will say he loves me with an angelic smile and spontaneous hug. Five minutes later I have to pull him out of the classroom into the hallway to deliver a stern lecture on why he can’t hit other kids. He starts to cry and yell at me that I’m not being fair, because “that other boy was playing too long with the red car after the timer went off!” Then, later that afternoon he decides to climb Mount Freeze-and-Fall while blindfolded because he knows I love him and will save him.

Wow, he has such confident love. Do we?  Do we know that we are loved back unconditionally, even when we have just showered our anger onto the one we trust? No, no, it’s okay. Does that cute little boy trust me?

Somehow, when we become adults, we presume that when our own plans don’t work out, or when life presents more closed doors that opened ones, it’s because nobody cares, we’re all alone, and the world is nothing but a horrible place that constantly seeks to knock us down. We can’t trust anyone. Maybe, sometimes, our great ideas, like climbing blindly on an ice hill, are not so great. Maybe our protests amid crying and shaking our fist at God show that we don’t know the end of the story.

When I was a child, I protested with many tears when I was told “no.” When my own children were growing up, they also protested quite loudly when their dad and I said “no.” Even now, as we go through our lives we protest vehemently when God says ”no.” I guess we feel we don’t need guidance anymore and should be allowed to make our own decisions. Partly true. We do make our own decisions, but when things don’t work out we blame other people. Proverbs 3:12 says, “For the Lord corrects those He loves, just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights.” Hebrews 12:6 says, “For the Lord disciplines those He loves and punishes each one He accepts as a child.” Unfortunately, we have developed an odd philosophy that entitlement shows love and denying our children nothing is more nurturing than teaching them the reality of life

None of us wants to be controlled or denied by the time we reach adulthood. But God’s motives in His discipline are strictly to bring us up to our full potential. There is no question that we can trust His love, even when we do something stupid. Hey, if you feel strongly that God told you to climb on the ice with your hat over your eyes, then He will see you through it. I knew for certain that my kids would fall down often as they learned to walk, but they had to go through it (with child-guard cushions on sharp corners). I still loved them desperately as they learned, even though they had to get some bumps and bruises. The only way to learn balance is to lose it occasionally.

God also knows for certain we will fall as we navigate the path He has set before us. And just like the curly-headed moppet in my class, no matter what icy hill I’m climbing, blindly, I know that if God put it there, I can say, to Him, “It’s okay! I trust You!”

Dance on.