of bb's and michelin men

Lo, sons are an heritage from the Lord. Psalm 127:3

My sister must have this verse posted in her house somewhere. Maybe more than once. With five sons, she's got a lot of heritage floating around. In fact, I am just off the phone with her, and she has informed me that her heritage have taken over the backyard with bb guns and sabres.

The one agreement she has with them about these bb guns and their flying steel is: goggles. You wanna play...you gotta wear the ski goggles. Sure enough, they are content to look absurd and bug-like so long as they get to shoot at one another with real bb's. No kiddie snap caps for these'uns; it's real artillery, boys.

And the goggles inspire. The boys don headgear, sweatshirts, puffy jackets, Thinsulate gloves, and probably some duct tape, too. My sister's little band of Michelin Men. In the twilight, flashlights attached to the barrels of their guns, they throw themselves around in a mad whorl of energy, giggles, and shouting.

For my sister, this game of cat and mouse seems a mild improvement on her brood's other go's at backyard fun: attempting human flight from the rooftop onto the trampoline, creating and launching homemade pyrotechnics (Mom, it's just gun powder! insisted her 16-year old inventor-son), and building fires in the barbecue grill with leaves, sticks, and lots of lighter fluid: more fluid=higher flames.

I'm sure there's some sort of message in here about violence among children and the great need for cautious parenting in this day and age, but I have no desire to find it. My nephews, I am afraid, are terribly un-PC. They break all the rules about wearing helmets and looking both ways and using power tools. Thank God. They live raw. They taste the life around them, complete with stitches, broken bones, and lots and lots of bandaids.

So this is all to say that I am thinking lately about how God parents us and what freedoms He gives us and what prohibitions He insists on while He is raising us. Does He warn us every time we go out the door that the world we live in is precarious, a dangerous place, and that we ought to take care with every step, not talk to strangers? Somehow, I don't think so. In fact, I think I hear the opposite. I hear, not the hard and ruthless man that the unfaithful servant imagined in his master (Matthew 25), exacting, harsh and fearful of the future, but rather the heroic Aragorn who says that to live bravely is to live into what you cannot yet see....and that takes thumbing your nose at critics and self-doubt and then stepping into the fray.

That, the voice of Jesus our Prophet, Priest, and King, is the one I recognise each day when I muddle through difficulty and worry, self-doubt and unbelief. And that's the voice I'll obey when I am afraid and want to live in the mire of caution and safety. Goggles on! when I'm told, but bb's popping, fireworks exploding, and fires a'stoking I will go!