So this morning I dropped off my oldest for first day of her senior year. I dropped my middle daughter off for her first day of High School. It was impossible not to remember when I held each of their hands and walked them into kindergarten. I know confessing this to you is cliché – but saying something is cliché is another way of saying that it is universal and true. Then I put in a James Taylor tape, and he was singing that song to his daughter Sally that is so full of remorse about her growing up with him away all the time. Then I thought about my nephew in West Virginia who started kindergarten this year. Then I got to the office and put on a CD and Chet Atkins was playing that Malvina Reynolds song, “Turn Around,” and I thought “Well, I might as well find the sound track to Fiddler on the Roof and make it an official breakdown.” But I didn’t.

What I did do (and continue to do, and hope you will join me) was to say a prayer for our children, and particularly for the children of Beslan, Russia. Whenever I think about the horror those families are still suffering at the hands of Islamic terrorists, any malaise I yield to seems self-indulgent. My children are safe, whole, and well. Thank you, God.

The pangs of separation have been particularly acute around here this year. Two of our graduating seniors left nests behind that are now completely empty. At my house, as we fill out the forms, and make preparations for a college trip that is now less than a year away, any words of comfort I have to offer to newly alone parents always sound like I’m trying to convince myself of something.

Psalm 127.3 says Behold, children are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the Womb is a reward, like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. Solomon wrote that, and the wisdom of it is evident. Children are arrows. We provide them direction and energy, but for them to fly we must let them go. If I had a choice, I’d rather not be the warrior in this metaphor, but a feather on the arrow – in the back, continuing to affect the flight path, always attached. But that is not the way it is supposed to be.

Psalm 127 says something else. It says children are gifts from God. They are His before they are ours. They don’t stop being His. My nephew, Ben, was baptized last Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t help remembering that April Fool’s day afternoon more than 9 years ago when I first held him, at Prince William Hospital. It is an overwhelming blessing to be with a child on two birth days. It is a blessing Teresa and I have been given with all three of our girls. When our youngest was baptized we looked at each other with the knowledge we would accomplish nothing superior to this – giving back to the Lord all He had entrusted to us.

They are our arrows, but they are his children. We may promise that we will always be there for them, but we know when we put them on the bus for their first day of school that no matter how desperately we strive to keep that promise we will not be able to keep it. God alone can, and does.

“Do not be afraid, because I am with you. I will bring your children in from the east, gather you from the west, say to the north ‘give them up’ and to the south ‘don’t keep my children from me’. Bring my sons from afar, my daughters from the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 43.5-7