Ready, Aim, Fire

My husband recently decided to take up hunting. He bought a bow, complete with the arrows, some special sights and even a target for practice. He's rather taken with the idea of being the proverbial hunter/gatherer this year. He'd love to bring home a deer (hopefully in little white packages from the butcher!) and fill our freezer with meat that he obtained through the manliest of efforts to provide for our large family.

Eh. I'm just as happy selecting my meat from the meat department at the local grocery store. I'd probably go as far as to purchase a half a cow in order to have a stocked freezer, but that's taking it far enough. The whole "go out and shoot your dinner" concept is slightly lost on me. Especially when the equipment to do this probably costs as much as all of the meat my family will eat this winter--figure that one out! But, I'm a woman. I'm supposed to be at home keeping the home fires burning until my man comes back from the forest with his kill slung over his shoulder, right? Uh, yeah...right.

Although I'm not racing out the door to test that bow myself--he is literally in the backyard practicing his target skills as I type these words--the sight of it and the arrows does bring to mind a familiar passage of Scripture. 

"Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD; and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows in the hand of a mighty man; so are the children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate" (Psalm 127:3-5, KJV).

Children are a gift from God--a reward, even. Take a look at verse four. Just as arrows are a useful weapon in the hands of a warrior who knows how to use them properly, so are our children a support and a defense for the family.

As many times as I've heard and read that children are like arrows and the man whose quiver is full of them is blessed, I never took a moment to consider what that actually meant. I'm certainly not about to use my children to bring home food to feed the family. I'm also not going to use them to defend the family. So, what could they possibly have in common with a warrior's arrows?

One thing that leaps out at me about arrows is that they are always kept right at the side of the warrior or hunter, right under the protection of his arm. He would never step far from his arrows because he would lose his strength and be vulnerable to his enemies. 

So it is with our children. They must be kept by our side, under the shelter of our wings. If we let them stray too far from us, we lose our effectiveness as parents and leave them vulnerable to the wiles of the enemy. They take shelter with us, trust us. Have one of your toddlers ever cried when you left the room? They feel the most safe and natural in your presence. That's not an accident--God designed it that way.

Another similarity between children and an arrow is that they must be aimed. An arrow cannot just be shot off in any direction, hoping for some miraculous effectiveness. They have to be positioned just right in the bow, they're drawn back just so, held steady until the aim is perfect, then released to do their job. 

So it is with our children. We hold them in our arms and sharpen them until they're ready to take a position in the world (start school, spend time at friends' houses, go off to college, etc). Then, to the best of our ability, through the Holy Spirit, we take aim and hold steady until just the right moment. Then we release them to do God's work. Our careful aim and steady hand prepares them so that, through them, our Father can build the next generation of His church.

"Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6, NIV).

My son is about to join the Air Force. In fact, as I mentioned in my last post, he's vying for a spot at the Air Force Academy. We held him under our protective wings for many years. We sharpened him as best we could. We positioned him in our bow, took aim and held steady until the Lord let us know it was time to let go. Then, whoosh, we released him into the world, trusting him to the Fathers keeping and protection. We believe in the promise that our training will not return void--he will not depart from it. And, like a arrow in the hand of a warrior, our boy will make us proud.