God is the boss of my house

Written for the Sentinel

Several years ago I agreed to watch after a friend's child for a morning. It wasn't long after the agreement was made that I began to have some doubts. Other friends were quick to tell me about the unsettling experiences they had had with this family. Their stories detailed the damage that had been done and the futility of trying to stop the untoward behavior of one child in particular. It was this same child for whom I had agreed to baby-sit.

The morning of this activity was soon at hand. The doorbell rang, and there was my friend with her child. Suddenly I was washed over with a feeling of regret; I wished that I had had the sense to say "no" in the first place. I had children of my own to think about. Injuries to other children were included in the list of bad things this child had supposedly done. Even pets weren't safe, according to what I had heard. I would have been very happy to just drop into a hole.

Well, nobody ever solved a problem by dropping into a hole—except in a cartoon, and this was no cartoon! The child was in the front hall, and I could tell that the time for prayer had come. As soon as I realized that I had to rely on God's power, a thought came to me. I had been reading hymns in the Christian Science Hymnal earlier. The words behold reality popped into my thought. They are the second verse of Hymn No. 206: