into your hands, I commit
As she walks, baby girl holds on to my friend’s finger for dear life, just the one, in a white-knuckled grip.
“You can do this on your own, sweet girl; you don’t need me,” my friend is saying, her coffee forgotten and growing cold on the kitchen table.
Baby girl keeps taking those exaggerated steps, her blue eyes trained on the carpet with singular focus, but the moment my friend carefully pulls her finger free, baby girl turns back abruptly, grunting disagreement, those baby knees suddenly trembling. The only way to strengthen weak knees is to hold to a steady hand.
“She just lacks the confidence,” my friend says, smiling at me, and I smile back, thinking how much better off I’d be if I truly understood that my only sure steps are the ones I take while holding on to the certainty of God’s love.
Baby girl knows my friend is her safety, the way I’m coming—always becoming—to understand that God is mine.
Blessed is the person who finds confidence in the LORD, the prophet Jeremiah wrote, whose confidence is the LORD.
It wasn’t that the people who received Jeremiah’s prophecies had stopped claiming God at all, but that they idolized a whole host of other gods they’d made for themselves too, and God has always wanted absolutely all of our affection. Jesus made it clear; I can’t serve God and anything else. I can’t hold on baby-girl tight to God’s hand and also keep my grip on the applause of people or my intellectual ability or my financial stability. You either hold on for life, see, or it’s a death grip.
Baby girl balances on those new legs and looks up, those sea-deep eyes imploring in silent paragraphs as she ever-so slowly extends her tiny hand again toward my friend. That look, so determined, says something like, If you won’t let me hold on to you, I’m not gonna walk.
“Okay, okay,” my friend says, sighing, returning her finger to that tiny palm.
I think of Moses crying out to God, declaring with resolve, If you won’t go with me, please don’t even send me up from here.
When I truly trust in God more than I trust in myself, I’ll be unwilling to take a single step without Him. I’ll stop still and reach for Him first, until I feel His solid finger in my palm, and if I’m too busy to do that, if I just can’t find the time, I’ve got a death-grip on something that’s not strong enough to hold me up.
David, the poet King, said it this way, I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken…My soul clings to you, your right hand upholds me.
Word pours over me, through me, as I watch baby-girl giraffe-walk her way through the land of discarded toys and into the kitchen, holding my friend by the finger, her eyes trained on a window and a garden cart full of growing plants stretching their leaves up. Word says, Be like a little child.
The LORD makes firm the steps of the one who delights in him; though he may stumble, he will not fall, for the LORD upholds him with his hand.
Baby girl looks up, checking my friend’s face while continuing toward that window with unbridled enthusiasm. She’s picking up speed, and in fact, baby girl even grins, a wide, gummy smile, now that she’s sure my friend won’t leave her.
It is, to my mind, the picture of pilgriming on as a disciple, of learning spiritual discernment while trusting in the safety of God’s ever-presence and shepherding care. There are right and wrong directions in which to go, sometimes just good and better ones, and the truth is that at the same time we are all learning how to walk in faith, we are also learning to submit our childish wills to alignment with God’s heart.
Baby girl moves, decidedly, toward that plant cart, where, from the top, a leafy stem dangles tantalizingly down, trailing toward the floor, and my friend says, “No, you don’t need to go over here; there’s nothing for you here,” and she bends down, wrapping her arms around baby girl’s tiny waist and lifting her into the air, and moves quickly back across the room to where the toys still lie scattered on the floor.
I watch baby girl’s legs kicking a little in the air, watch her eyes flick from that plant with it’s trailing stem and glossy leaves to my friend’s face, watch baby girl decide if she will cry as the One She Trusts thwarts her will. But in the end, baby girl decides that the ride, up high in my friend’s arms, far exceeds any delight she had expected to find over there by the window. I see it happen, the moment when her baby face brightens with the recognition that this, this, this flying through the air in the arms of safety, is absolutely better than anything.
