feeling safe

Some days all I want is to feel safe.

I want safe people and safe thoughts and safe activities.
I want to keep my children close and protect them from all harm.
I want safety even as I know in my very bones that a safe life is impossible.

I know I cannot protect myself or anybody else from the dangers of the world.
We live in precarity.

Yet I still want it.

I have been known to dream of a sweet little town where all the people I love go to live and work and socialize. But then I realize that if I bring the people I love, they would bring the people they love and so on and so forth until the town would no longer be my perfect idyll. It would grow and grow until my sweet little town became the whole entire world.

The very world that God created.

And even though I know our world is not meant to be safe, it feels possible that if everybody in this world loves somebody else, that love could spread, reaching into crevices to fix our brokenness and heal our ills.

Which would bring us right back to my sweet little dream town filled with love.

I believe this is possible, because hope runs eternal in this body and soul of mine, but today is my sad day.

Today I watched as kid after kid was contact traced all the way home.
Today my second fully vaccinated friend tested positive for Covid.
Today I wonder why I care so much when it is completely obvious that so many others do not.
Today I let myself be sad.

And that’s okay, because Jesus wept, too.
I’ll be hopeful tomorrow.