About 6 years ago I watched a big yellow monster swallow my 5-year-old son, duotang-stuffed backpack and all, and lumber off with him down the highway for the first time.
My 3-year-old daughter wailed in my arms as we tried to get her to wave good-bye (to this day we've never been able to figure out if she was crying because he was leaving, or because she wasn't).
My eyes misted with pride and loss and brine as I drove to work that morning.
He didn't even look back as he climbed the steps of the bus.
I was thinking about all this yesterday as my children shared their first-day-of-school stories at the dinner table. Stories of another first day, when yet again we let the big yellow monsters of this world swallow our children, in the hopes that they'll spit them back on the curb at the end of the day, older and wiser and refined for Christian life in a secular world.
These are among the hardest moments of parenting.
But the Psalmist claims that children are like arrows in the hand of a warrior-- and that when our quiver is full of them we can stand before the enemy in the gate with perfect confidence. And it makes me think: as hard as they are, perhaps these moments when we watch our children step out again for the first time-- first day of school-- first day on the job-- first day as a newly-wed-- first time holding a child of their own-- in all these firsts, perhaps we're actually watching them be sharpened for that day when we stand up for truth and justice in the gate.
As arrows in our quiver, may God make our childrens' hearts keen-edged; may he make them fly true; and may he speed them home.
The Seventh First Time
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