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When my daughters went off with their father for a two-week vacation, I
shifted with surprising ease from single parent to single person. I'd
been to the movies and dinner and was driving home in the Bronx, when I
heard a radio report that sharks had been sighted off the Jersey shore.
The girls were staying right near there.
It
took no time at all for my newly achieved status as a convincing single
person to fall away, leaving a fretful mother envisioning her young
children on floaties surrounded by shark fins.
"Sharks?"
I pleaded audibly to my caravan of no one. "I don't need this right
now!"
I'd arranged the disaster in my mind as
carefully as the director of "Jaws."
My reaction was so
immediate, and so thoughtless, that it didn't occur to me to try to
reason through my fear. I had gone -- more like plummeted -- into
a well of fear in which there were only dark predictions. Once home, I
made hasty phone calls -- to the children's father, to warn him and our
girls, and on not reaching them, to my mother. I'd arranged the disaster
in my mind as carefully as the director of "Jaws" might have.
Surprisingly, my mother said, "I'm sure he'll keep them out of the
deep water. They'll be fine."
We
have tended to feed mercilessly on his perceived weaknesses.
I questioned her sudden faith in my
ex-husband, as it seemed out of keeping with the way my family and I had
come to regard him during the divorce. Shark-like ourselves, we have
tended to feed mercilessly on his perceived weaknesses. But here was
Mom, coming back strong, resistant to the imagined catastrophe and to
the notion of him as careless.
My mother couldn't have said it better unless she'd quoted directly from
John in the Bible to remind me that, "Perfect love casteth out
fear." Her quick dismissal of the possibility of harm coming to her
granddaughters reminded me to stop and think, to let Spirit-based ideas
rule over the issue of a shark sighting.
I needed to pray through my fear with love
rather than let it prey upon me.
She'd reminded me,
not in so many words, that I needed to pray through my fear with love
rather than let it prey upon me, as I had preyed upon a
less-than-capable version of the children's father.
As part of my attempt to understand the basis of my fear and to dispel
it further, I looked up "shark" in Webster's and found four
separate definitions:
1) the literal one, delineating the fish;
2) the one assigning the "rapacious" qualities of the fish to
a person;
3) the more positive-seeming description of "one who excels"
at something;
4) the verb, "to live by shifts and stratagems."
I figured out that scarier than the dorsal suggestion of a shark is its
human version --which in this case was my thought, guided by the
"shifts and stratagems" of definition #4 rather than by faith
in the steadfast, loving government of Spirit. I resolved to instead
embody definition #3 by excelling at seeing the presence of Spirit's
government in my life and in my children's lives, no matter where we
found ourselves, even when we were apart. I calmed down.
The kids are back with me now for the school year, and they had an
excellent, and safe, time with their dad. And my feelings toward him
have shifted with the relief of seeing that he can take good care of
them.
And I'm glad to say now that there are no more sharks at this beach.
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