Certainty and Peace

I’ve spent the last two nights in a bed over-crowded with little bodies.  The annual spring storms have driven them into my bed with a mixture of thunder crashes and howling winds.  The air rumbles and the wind cracks and the children snatch up their pillows, fling open their doors, race down the long hallway and clamber up into our bed.  Their father and I speak not a word, just reposition ourselves to make room for just one more until there is hardly a space left for us to squeeze into.  He stretches out his arm over the tops of  all those small heads, and intertwines his fingers in mine as we both drift back to sleep.

We are safety to them.  How heroic we must be in their small eyes.  There is no tempest, villain, or imaginary beast which cannot be kept at bay by the magic of mom’s bed.  There is magic in those sheets and pillows which soothes sick tummies and smooths worried brows.  Our job is their safety, and they trust us to do it well.

God, in His wisdom and cleverness, designed it this way.  It is obvious in the perfect fit of my body curled up around theirs.  No matter the child, they always seem to fit just so.  I listen to their contented sighs and their even breathing as the storms rage outside and I envy them.  What I would have given to know the peace they know so easily.  The knowledge of safety and protection is a right of childhood, but once it is lost, it is not easily regained.  Once fear has crept into the mind, it doesn’t easily leave.

I had this once, and lost it.  I thought that I would never again feel safe in the dark.  But I lay in my bed, surrounded by little slumbering bodies…their father’s fingers stroking mine, and I sigh contented sighs.  This is God’s plan; it is so obvious to see.  In calming their fears and quieting their worries, I somehow reach back and caress the face of the girl I used to be.  The small fearful child who still lives in me learns from my children about believing in a parent’s love.  I learn from them about how a Father’s protection feels, about the warm security which covers them. I learn to curl up trustingly and listen to my Father’s voice.  Certainty and peace are the right of a child.  We only have to learn to trust, and there they are.