FIrm Faith

This week we bid our youngest, 18 year old Mackenzie, farewell and sent her on a big adventure. She has been planning this for months and my wife has meticulously helped her plan each aspect of the journey. So, this past Monday she packed up a few of her belongings and we all headed for the airport to give our hugs and kisses and watch her head off out of eyesight as she boarded her plane. She is off to Europe, Austria to be specific, and will spend the next 4 months working at a Bible School, traveling and making new friends followed by a trip back to Canada to renew friendships and spend some time with family.
As a family we are all at varying degrees of both excitement and nervousness for her as she does this. Excitement, because we know that adventure always brings with it an element of change, a pushing past what is comfortable in order to experience something bigger than we are, bigger than we know, bigger than just our tiny little circle of life. This comes with possibilities that seem to reach the sky and joy that soars bringing memories that can remain so vivid and full of life they are not easily forgotten. Nevertheless, we are also nervousness, because when something so precious as one your daughters follows a dream the worst part for me is that I know that such dreams can be crushed and bring pain and hurt because the world can be such a nasty place sometimes. Of course we all hope for the best and pray for a terrific experience for her. However, always somewhere in the back of the mind there is a little nagging sensation that something could go wrong and that this could turn out to be less than what we had hoped for. That sense of protection from the big bad world is strong within parents and it can push our hearts beyond simple nervousness to worry and even fear. This was brought into a tangible feeling when we awoke Tuesday morning to discover that her original flight out of Auckland was delayed by several hours, which meant her connecting flights were all going to be missed. This news for a moment created a sense of panic and a feeling of helplessness that was so raw and so real.
This is when our faith becomes so essential to how we handle this kind of scenario. We talk, we consider the options, and we pray. We trust in the Lord with all of our hearts, we seek his strength to face each day with all its ups and downs and spin-arounds. We know he loves us more than we could know and that he will watch over all of us, especially MacKenzie while she is so far away from us. This assurance calms our hearts, releases our fears and comforts us. It moves us outside of our tiny perspective and gives us an inkling of his viewpoint and thus creating a firm place, as the bible says a table-land, to stand reassured that he is actively involved in all our ways, all our comings and all our goings as a family... at least until the next bump in the road when the cycle is repeated again.