Cynthia and I are being shocked at how our daughter is becoming a young lady. She's growing up so much it's amazing. I'm challenged to learn everything I can about parenting because she's getting older faster than I can keep up.
Recently, some good friends of ours have started a ministry combating child abuse (here's a plug for them and their excellent book). Coupled with that, I also just went through Wycliffe's mandatory child abuse prevention training, which really impacted me now that I have two young children who are getting bigger every day. It's scary hearing in the news how many evil people there are around who do things to innocent kids. Cynthia and I realize that we're both really lucky that neither of us had to deal with anything like that as baggage from our childhoods, but we have friends who have had to. It's very difficult. I think it's becoming more and more common as our culture becomes more sexually "liberated" and we're throwing off the boundaries of conscience that God gave us for our happiness.
But I don't want to write about that: as the saying goes, cursing the darkness isn't going to help. I'm going to try to be proactive in protecting my children and teaching them to know what's dangerous and what's not, but I feel very inadequate. Ultimately, it comes back to faith: I won't always be there for my children in every situation, no matter how involved I am or how much I try to shelter them. It's not worth feeling bad about because it's impossible. If I tried to never let them out of my sight they would never have a chance to mature. All I can do is trust God that He'll watch over them when I can't, and that He'll keep them safe from the dangers that I know I'm inadequate to protect them from. All I can do is pray every day that He'll protect them. All I can do is trust that He knows what He's doing.
That's really the only way I can sleep at night.
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