worry
A friend says, the text coming in gently, it must be hard for you to let her just walk through that door.
Yes, I type. Yes.
I sit in the car, waiting while Riley digs her bookbag out of the trunk, talking to herself in a soothing, rhythmic way. She turns to look at me before she crosses the parking lot toward the door, smiling wide. Her t-shirt is cherry-red, with a picture of Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf on the front. Smiling’s my favorite, it says. She giggles, adjusting the shirt with her free hand, balancing a Starbucks Christmas cup in the other.
She’s striking, a bloom set off by Winter skies, so beautifully tender, so vulnerable, it makes me ache to see her turn now and walk away. One harsh touch would leave a bruise.
Who will protect her when I’m not watching?
Somewhere hidden, I entertain the ghost of an idea, that I’m the one keeping track of my children.
Beyond that, for every solid step a child takes away, something inside a mama rips and stings, as though the sharing of our bodies remains alive in the mind, even as they grow into adulthood. It’s as though our children carry a part of us away. I had said as much to Zoe when we left her at college, holding her face in my hands as we cried. A part of me stays here. With you.
It’s not so hard, maybe, to understand why God plants His own Spirit in the children He loves.
Of my three, Riley has been most like Peter, staring out over black waves with one leg already thrown over the side of the boat, urging, “Tell me to come to you on the water, Lord”, except that for her, there will be no looking down, no losing herself to the reality of the deep, only that wild laugh, breaking through the trembling quiet. Riley never worries, only trusts.
I worry for both of us, white-knuckling the steering wheel as I turn my way out of the parking lot toward the road home, imagining a sudden seizure taking hold of her the moment she’s out of sight, wondering if anyone will be there to catch her fall or cradle her head, to count the minutes until she regains consciousness, to watch her chest carefully as it rises and falls. Will there be a voice she knows calling her name, calling her back? It’s as if I think I could change any of it just by being there.
Can you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life? The Spirit of God draws my heart back to Christ’s question, from His sermon on the mount, turning it, like a prism. How can you, by worrying, add a single hour to her life? …If you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?
My attention torn, I reluctantly accelerate, half here, in the car, half there, walking with Riley to class.
Once, after a particularly bad seizure, I had tried to stay close to Riley, always watchful, always ready, waiting for the next event. I was determined not to let her out of my sight, but she had eventually fixed me with a determined, assessing glare, the only time, really, I have ever seen that look, and said, “I’ll be okay, Mom,” just quietly, her voice grave.
I get back home and start to dig into the Word, the words, into Christ, trying to hear. In the lexicon I find the word translated worry in the New Testament record of that sermon, merimnao, which means, to be pulled apart. She takes a part of me, then, and I unravel. Immediately, I recognize this idea as the opposite of the Hebrew shalom, that is, the soundness and completeness God establishes as a guard over my heart. “He will keep in perfect peace”—in shalom, Word is, “the one whose mind is stayed on Him.”
So, what’s a mama to do, except to look away from my worst-case imagination and fix my gaze instead on Christ? It’s like remembering that the cord that binds me to my children, that bold red thread, isn’t just some phantom umbilical bond but is actually the blood of Christ. In truth, He will wrap right around the both of us and hold us together. Shalom. Nothing falls to pieces when He’s the tie that binds.
Jesus had this way of preaching an entire sermon with one question, and I see it now, how my love can be a safe shelter, stayed on Him, or it can be as tenuous as the house built on the shifting sand, because if it’s up to me, falling apart is inevitable. What she needs from me isn’t my worry, but my solid reliance on the One who gives His peace, because worry will downright tear a heart apart.
Turns out, Riley knows this already.
I had been telling my parents as we turned in the drive, before my friend’s gentle text, before Riley digging her backpack out of the trunk, that God is kind, that He’s always aware before I am of what I need, that He always provides, and Riley, sitting back there with her coffee and a stack of napkins, had leaned forward and said, “Amen,” her voice weighty and bold, carrying from the backseat out, into all the world.
May it be so.
And then she went, in peace.
