The Answers

My heart is unsteady. It always is, to some extent, but today…….today I don’t know what to think. Today I am a little bit scared and anxious for myself, and once again I find myself a little bit scared and anxious for my child.

Once again, I see images everywhere of fear and terror. Once again, I hear in every news report a news anchor’s attempt at being just that: an anchor in the uncertain storm of today’s world. Once again, I brace myself to answer questions that may come from my daughter…while I myself try to find answers for myself that will make it a little easier to sleep tonight. Once again, I am faced with the aching reality that this world is tragically and irreparably broken, and remember again that it is my job to somehow equip my precious daughter to navigate her way through things she was never meant to know.

How – oh, how – do I do this? My own mind wrestles with thoughts of fear and possibilities. My own thoughts wander too often to what could happen. I myself am still in training, learning how to keep my eyes fixed on the certainties and to avert them from the unknowns. I am still figuring out how to make it through an average day with all of its average-day concerns. What will we have for supper? How can I make this month’s grocery budget stretch a little further? How can I find a way to be where I need to be when that is a million places and they’re all a million miles away?

Those are the concerns I am still just trying to accommodate in this shaky mind of mine. I am ill-equipped to handle it myself….so I have no idea how to lead this child through the turbulent waters of life as we know it today. And those things of life that are filling the headlines with terrifying frequency? I don’t have the answer. I have nothing to offer.

There is so much that I don’t know. There is so much I don’t understand. There are also a million things I do know that I wish I didn’t. But, despite all of that, there are some things that I am more certain of with every beat of my heart and every tear that falls from my eyes and every horrifying headline I open my browser to see.

God is good. He is light and life and joy and comfort and peace. He is help for the helpless and sight for the blind and a song of triumph for the deaf. He is radiance in the darkness and a rock in rising waters. He is everything that this world is not, and when a new need presents itself to my heart He stands at the ready to meet it. He is certainty in the midst of questions and hope in the depths of despair. What I am not, He is….and when I have nothing, He is more than I ever dreamed.

So no, I don’t have the answers to all of the nitty-gritty hard stuff life throws at me and demands that I figure out. In those things, I don’t have a clue. I’m naive and sheltered and clueless. But in the big things? The real things of life? I know the answers. Jesus is that answer, and while I may feel the expectation to throw every answer to every question at my daughter, ultimately there is just one answer to one question that I have to get right. There is one thing she must know about every mystery of life. If in every question she looks to Jesus for the answer, I have done my job.

The world is uncertain and scary. True. But do I have to figure it all out to be a good person and a great mom? No. I know what matters, and I stay fixed on that.