No questions

Has your child ever been in a situation where his life depended on his immediate cooperation, no questions asked? Maybe you had been remiss in training him in instant obedience---you had allowed him too many times to engage you in negotiations; you had gone into lengthy explanations to justify your demands to his satisfaction so that he would see the reasonableness of compliance.

Now you are in a life-or-death moment, no time for the usual rigmarole: "Make one false move and you're dead. It is very important that you DO EXACTLY WHAT I SAY---RIGHT NOW." (The child doesn't see the truck careening around the bend, doesn't see the rattler five feet behind him.)

In C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair, Aslan had solemn last words for Jill before she began her mission: "Here on the mountain the air is clear and our mind is clear. As you drop down into Narnia the air will thicken. Take care that it doesn't confuse your mind. . . . Remember the signs. Nothing else matters."

Sometimes I don't know how the Lord doesn't chew his holy fingernails to the bone. There he is, our Parent, seeing the danger we are about to walk into, seeing our perplexity when his instructions and chastisements don't make sense to us. The book of Hebrews keeps pleading with us to "hold on" because our life depends on it. God told us to live by faith and not by sight---to live by his "signs" and to let nothing in this thickened air of daily life confuse our minds. But sometimes I wonder if he can barely resist showing us what's around the corner so that we will more easily comply.

"Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful" (Hebrews 10:23).

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