Today I took a walk in the neighborhood and found what has always been there: pairs of lime green acorns, budding fruit on a pine and seed pods growing from an unnamed tree.

Like my child, these things grow naturally, nurtured by an unseen Hand, not my own. In all these years of toiling and fretting about creating a healthy, happy competant child, I’ve learned that my job isn’t to create; it is to nurture what has already been created. Whew, relief.

Our children will be what they will be. Surely, we water them with love and give them the best soil from which to spring forth. But the love-seed that contained their personality and destiny was made by Hands not our own.

So, I’ve learned that there is little I have control over. (Thank God!) And trying to be in control of a process (the natural growth of my child), was never my responsibility to take. In this I can take refuge. Won’t you?