Tiny Boy stood perched on the top rung of a ladder that led down into 10-15 foot deep water.


 We had walked out to the end of a pier which is little more that a long pile of huge rocks with a giant's vegetable can - sans the wrapper, and now filled with giant size rocks - at the end. The older children were jumping from the pier into the newly dredged channel below. Only a week earlier we had been able to walk all the way around the end of the pier in knee deep water.


 Now Tiny Boy wanted to climb down into the water with everyone else. My heart skipped several beats as he neared the edge, swung his legs around and started to descend. I held onto his puddle jumper life jacket the whole time. He tried to lower himself to the next rung but could not. I was still clinging so tightly to him and he could go no further.

"Let go, Mom." he said.

I let go, but in my heart I was screaming, "I can't!"

He climbed up and down the ladder several more times as I watched, my heart needing a pacemaker the whole time.

I have always found it difficult to let go of my children. I am that mother who cries every time I send a tiny child off to school. (Number five starts this fall. She is ready. Mom is NOT ready.) In the past two years, both sets of grandparents have taken the older kids on vacations to fun places like Disney World and the Grand Canyon. I have let them go, but prayed for their safe return the whole time.

I know what you are thinking.

Yes. I am the mother who wrote about putting the lives of my children into God's hands and accepting the days allotted to them. Yet, KNOWING that I have placed their lives in God's hands and DOING the work of letting go, often feels very contradictory.


As I read this familiar passage of scripture yesterday morning, I felt the Lord reminding me that God is the protector of my children, and all of the worrying in the world will accomplish nothing.

So, my husband said the other day, "When are you going to schedule the driving test so Josiah can get his driver's license?"

"Never." I wanted to say, "Because then he will think that he should be allowed to drive WITHOUT one of us in the car!"

But instead I said, "I will do it this week."