Toeing the Line

In all my spare time, I nanny 3 1/2 year old twin boys. That is, when I am not doing homework, working for my parents, reading, driving my little sisters around, traveling for wedding and wedding showers, helping plan my sister's wedding, and all the other little things... that is when I nanny.

So, these boys are hilarious and also a trip all rolled up into two twin tenacious tornadoes. They say some of the funniest things that result in me sending at least one quote filled text, each time I nanny, to family and friends. This family lives on a busy street and as such the boys are not allowed to go past a certain lamppost on the driveway (I am not talking about a Narnia inspired lamppost, just a normal one). Part of their backyard backs up to woods and as such, their parents have requested that they not venture into the woods because they are uncertain as to whether or not there is poison ivy in said woods. However, from day 1 (of my time being there), the boys have liked to toe the line.

They will get as close to the line they are not allowed to cross, without actually crossing the line.

Today, they would stand at the lamppost and ask me if they could go past, knowing full well the answer to that question. In the woods they would stand so that their feet were as close to the woods as physically possible without actually being in the woods.

In some ways, it was completely frustrating.

I wasn't trying to keep them out of the woods or out of the road to prohibit them from having fun. Their parents were not trying to put crazy restrictions on their play. Rather they were trying to protect them. I was asking the boys to stay out of the woods, away from the end of the driveway because I knew what lay on the other side of the lamppost; I knew what was past the grass line. And we wanted to protect them. Protect them from what they could not see and what they did not know but what we could see and what we knew.

As I was driving home this afternoon it sort of hit me: God is the way.

Sometimes it is so easy to think that God is trying to prohibit me from having fun or somehow that my thoughts and plans are better than His. But the whole time it is my way of thinking that is jaded. It is almost as if God is saying: "My child, can't you see? I am trying to protect you. I have seen what is past the lamppost; I have seen what is in the woods. I am not trying to limit you, I am trying to protect you."

But just like the boys had a choice on whether or not to listen to me, so I have a choice with God. That doesn't mean that I always make the right choice, but at the end of the day I get to decide whether to venture past the lamppost (again, not a Narnia reference). Maybe I will learn to listen more to God, with a renewed understanding of the difference between protection and prohibiting.

But just like the boys, sometimes I just like to toe the line to see how far I can get without actually getting too far.