Will You Be There?

Jesus said, quoting Himself from the King James, “Lo, I am with you always.”* And that doesn’t just mean when we’re on the ground, either. He also said, “I will never, ever desert you and I will never, ever, ever forsake you.”** (which is how it reads literally in the Greek New Testament).

I just finished a sweet little article by a pastor who listed “The 3 Coolest Things About My Life Right Now” (the list actually cited six things, which was neat what he did) and among those he listed was a little nugget about his four year old daughter who hasn’t quite learned the order of her days of the week just yet, but she knows that her Daddy is home on Saturdays and Mondays. “And so she asks every single day if tomorrow is one of those days,” he writes.

That’s just plain adorable!

Once upon a time, when I was a first-grader at Vandenberg Elementary School in Dolton, Illinois, school was dismissed because of a blizzard. The GREAT Blizzard of ’67. When I had toddled off to school that morning, the ground was visible and the air was (as I remember it) clear. But old man winter came in with a vengeance between those school bells and when I stepped out on the school’s porch and faced a whitened world with snow up to my knobby knees, such fear gripped me that I cried. A lot. How would I get home? I wondered. A most pitiable sight I was.

The sky looked no higher than the top of the roof and the ground was fortuitously catching up. I would not dare step in among those swells of snow. They fairly looked like they would swallow me in an instant, so I held my ground on the school’s steps beneath the awning, snow swirling all around, gales howling. And me, crying my little heart out.

Then, magic. Out of nowhere a voice materialized, one that I well knew and one that immediately set my heart aright and sent every ounce of fear packing: Mom.

“I’m here for you, Scott.”

“M-Mom?” I curved a gloved hand over my brows to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

She looked from my vantage point to be the Ruler of the Snows and appeared to be walking on top of them! It was a sight to behold for a scared little boy in mittens and goulashes.

“It’s me, honey. Just put your feet inside the boot tracks I make for you. I’ll lead you home.”

And that’s exactly what I did. Step by step, I put mine inside hers, always close behind so as to never lose sight of my Heroine of the Drifts, becoming braver with each plant of my boot; but my bravado wasn’t in my ability to heft my weary legs, it was in the pace she set and the size of her tracks. That, and the fact that she was always looking back, checking on me, smiling her encouragement. While the inches rose all the way home, I took comfort that my Mom’s legs were always taller than the inches in spite of the telling fact that mine weren’t.

You know, my Mom took me to school that morning. She must’ve known the weather might turn, but that’s not the story. She was there for me even as the storms mounted and led me bootprint for bootprint through a scary world and got me home, safe and sound. That’s what’ll get us home, too. This One who made the seas, walks atop them and His legs are always longer and stronger than the worst that life can give us. This journey is taking us to Him and the way is to follow in His steps.

Little kids never need to fret over the days of the week. They never need to wonder, Is tomorrow one of those days, Dad? He is there for them, be it a Saturday, a Monday or a Snow Day.

“Daddy, will you be there?”

He says, “I AM.”

*Matthew 28:20

**Hebrews 13:5