Today, a scary thing happened. A man in our neighborhood (a couple blocks over) began shooting at random houses on the street. As police surrounded his house, he fled in a truck, firing bullets at them as they pursued him. Eventually he was shot by law enforcement. He crashed his vehicle into a neighbor’s yard. The police dragged him out and took him to the hospital, where he died of his injuries.
This incident called for a lockdown at our school nearby. Kids huddled in dark closets, hushed to silence by their teachers. An emergency notice went out to families of students. I was glad to have walked them to school and return home an hour before the shooting began. I was even happier to pick them up after school no worse for the wear.
I imagine this could cripple a person for hoping in the future. Disaster struck, but not close enough to leave burn marks. I’ll walk my kids to school again in the morning and the day will begin fresh. When I get home, I’ll work on my online class, do some laundry, listen to GK beg me to hold her as I do a workout video (always during the workout videos, hmm, and a snuggle is always the best excuse to not finish Core de Force), scrub the toilet.
How is it that we aren’t promised tomorrow, and how is it that life is beautifully mundane? How can horror coincide with the daily, the get-up-and-eat-breakfast, without devastating us? How could one ever be prepared to lose a loved one when love is only a rhythm, a baseline, an extra cup of coffee in the coffee pot for me to warm in the microwave after he’s already left for work? It’s the unspoken promise that I’ll never be too busy for them, that I’ll be home when they come home, and there will be clean piles of clothes to wear. We can’t not take the beauty of life for granted; it is all we know.
We’ve been reading through the book of Daniel with the kids at night. (Not every night, just so you know. Some nights it’s Ribsy by Beverly Cleary. And some nights they wrestle on the floor until I get fed up and send them to bed.) It thrills me to read aloud the story of other brave young men to my boys. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego–now they had a story. When they arrived in Babylon as slaves, Nebuchadnezzar was king. He had a penchant for saying things like “do such-and-such or I will have you cut into pieces and your houses turned into piles of rubble.” (And you thought Trump was slightly egocentric and fanatical.)
The Jewish boys held their ground, though. They were level headed, self-controlled (Dan. 1:8) and smart (Dan. 1:17). They spoke “with wisdom and tact” (Dan. 2:14). They prayed fervently (Dan. 2:18) and were firm in their conviction that their God could handle anything. “We do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter,” they politely informed the king as he threatened to throw them in a furnace for not worshipping one of his idols.
Man, I want to be like that. I want my kids to be like that, and I think we’ve got to start preparing them to plant their feet on this soiled world and not budge an inch.
To keep their head when everyone around them is losing theirs.
To hold their bodies and minds in check when temptations are swirling around them.
To remember Who is spinning the world and breathing air into our lungs.
To not argue and pick senseless fights, but to shake their heads and say, “We do not need to defend ourselves to anyone.”
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego knew this: fiery flames aren’t reserved for just a blazing furnace. Nebuchadnezzar could cut them to pieces or roast them like hot dogs, it didn’t matter.
The world is ablaze, folks.
It is on fire and feeding us a confusing mix of misinformation. In sneaky, American terms, it says we can have everything we want and not lose our souls. It tells us we are just born a certain way, and our only hope is to follow our heart. It says money can buy happiness. That morality is a mere suggestion. That we can avoid pain and disaster. That it’s impossible! to destroy ourselves simply by becoming comfortable. That my spouse/kid/neighbor is a major hindrance to my self-actualization. That if we just got the right person in office, got our bodies into shape, if we just let people live without feeling shame about anything.
The lies keep licking at our feet. Flames flicker at the soft spots in our character, eager to melt it into puddles of indifference. “Let’s eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” quickly becomes our attitude (1 Cor. 15:32). For the Christian, there might be a temptation to hunker down, keep our mouths shut, close our eyes and cross our fingers.
But there was someone else in the fire with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. If they had kept their eyes shut then they wouldn’t have beheld Him. They wouldn’t have noticed their Rescuer was close enough to touch. No, their eyes were open in the fire, their hearts steady and full of hope.
When the Jewish trio came out of the fiery furnace at the command of the king, the Bible says they weren’t harmed in any way, not even a singed hair on their heads. There was no smell of fire on them (Daniel 3:27). If I barely fry bacon, I smell like it for a day. But these guys came out of a fire not even sweating.
I wonder at the world where my kids are growing up. Inevitably, if we do our job right as parents, they are going to be scorned by the majority. We are training them to defer to one another out of love for Christ (Eph. 5:21), which is diametrically opposed to the world’s advice of following your heart. We’ve been telling them to keep their eyes peeled for wolves in sheep clothing, when the world seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to dress up evil as good (if you need an example, look no further than your local bookstore’s drag queen story hour for children). We’re talking to them about the poisonous claws of marijuana and porn, among other things that are legal and destroying lives. We’re pointing out the lies of our culture, particularly the notion that a person’s worth is tied to their age, beauty, strength, and ability to contribute to society.
Our goal is for our kids is to worship, with their whole lives, the One who created us. This means sacrificing our “God-given right” to do whatever the heck we want. This means facing a furnace that’s been heated ten times hotter.
Will they stand up in the fire with their eyes open? I don’t know. It’s easier to pretend the fire isn’t blazing. At the very least it is in our nature to run away from fires.
Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego–they were unapologetic in their intensity to live as godly strangers, even as slaves to a merciless king. The only way they made it out of the fire was by keeping their eyes fixed on the Savior. Jesus–He who is in the furnace with us–is able to help us through the fire without getting burned. He wants us to train our eyes on Him.
He wants us in the fire and unafraid.
