Fear

What do you fear the most?  I have been asked that question many times and my answer has to be the same each time:  For someone I love (most especially my children) to be kidnapped.  This fear is well founded.  Stories of children taken and held captive and exposed to every kind of depravity and abuse.  I can hardly stand to listen.  A child being taken from her bed at night... I set my home alarm religiously.  Could there be anything worse than loosing a child who is findable?  But you can't find them?

When I was first married, I had a dream that I was outside my house in Tennessee and I could hear one of my children crying for me up in the hills around the home.  They were gone but wanted me to find them but it was impossible - there was nothing to tell me which way to go or what direction to begin my search.  The voice was all around me and yet so impossible to discern.  A child - MY child needing and wanting to be saved and me unable to do anything.  I woke up crying - sobbing really and terrified.  I would rather my whole family be killed and for me to have to pick up the pieces and start again than for one of my children to be taken and not be able to save them.  The fear and not knowing would destroy me.  How could you ever stop looking?  How could you ever go on?  How could you do anything but be consumed by the obsession of finding and saving your child.  How could you take time away from your search to love your other children or to be happy without wondering if that were the exact moment you might have found a clue...?  The thought of it all terrifies me still as I write.

So how has this fear changed my life?  I watch my kids like a hawk.  I follow them home from a friend's house on their bike after dark in my car with my lights shining on them protecting them all the way home.  I dress them all in fourescent orange matching outfits at amusement parks to warn predators, "THESE ARE MINE, HANDS OFF, It will be super obvious if you try to separate a member of MY pack!".  I don't let my kids go places alone - the buddy system is omnipresent.  When my teenage daughter begs to meet a friend at In & Out Burgers at midnight (because everyone is doing that!) I allow it on condition there are 3 or more going, one has to be a boy and they have to pick her up.  Yup - I'm crazy like that.  And I pray.  I pray a lot that God will not every ask me to bear that burden.  I will love, give, serve, sacrifice, fight, or whatever God asks of me as long as he does not ask that.  And I pray for those who have been given that cross to bear - the cross that would break me.  

I know I can't protect my children from all danger and harm - nor do I attempt to.  But the one danger that would be unbearable to me (and them) I do all I can do to protect them and I always will.