It’s the first day-long rain we’ve had in a while, even with the tropical rains that passed over a couple of weeks ago, as they were intermittent. The event, while relatively common, is still rare enough that it associates itself with specific memories. <\/p>\n
Driving home in the dark after our evening meeting at the church, I stopped at a light and fixated on the receding reflection of the tail lights ahead of me in the wet pavement, the two red triangles fading into the ground. It reminded me of car rides during our month-long trips home from France around Christmastime. We would invariably have one or two day-long rains, and being shuffled around from store to store as my parents shopped (most goods are much cheaper in the States than they were in France, so they stocked up) gave me a lot of time to observe the world around. I would stare at the halting trickles of water as they ran down the back seat window, and beyond into the shifting grid of traffic around us. The air felt different. I recognized that as a boy, but couldn’t assemble the words to describe it at the time. Still, my mind was unencumbered by cares, such as they are nowadays, and free to drink in the entirety of the world around.<\/p>\n
In the car tonight, I thought about the little boy in the car seat behind me. He has been a chatterbox lately, naming everything in sight, most things multiple times. He’s mastered enough of the basic sounds to be quite confident. But he was silent in the back seat, and I flipped down the mirror to watch him looking around, fixating on various things outside the car. I remembered what that felt like. He has been such a copycat lately that I know that everything he experiences is being hard-wired directly into his developing awareness. So I knew his mind was free to ponder, to dwell on indefinitely, the things he saw around him outside. <\/p>\n
Every child deserves for their mind to be utterly free from worry, enough to cling to fleeting sights and moments around them, to experience life. It develops at the very least a capacity to think abstractly, to ponder hypotheticals without the everyday details crowding in. And, in a larger sense, the more they are able to open their widening minds to the intricacies of the world, under the auspices of the parents, the more they will be able to hear, see, touch, taste and feel God communicating Himself through His creation; they will have a more deep-rooted knowledge that, “the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”<\/p>\n
I was, and am, a daydreamer, and I think this was fueled as much by my natural disposition as it was aided by the rock-solid stability of our home. I can’t recall a single time growing up when I was concerned one of my parents was going to leave; I don’t remember ever<\/i> feeling unloved. All the exclusively parental discussions and arguments were kept from my brothers and me, and if there was ever worry about the necessities of our day-to-day, it was kept far away enough that we never felt it.<\/p>\n
I want this for Luke. He deserves it. I want this for our family. And, LORD willing, we will have it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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