Faith

We read "Good-bye and Keep Cold" by Robert Frost this morning, which is about his desire to protect his orchard from too warm of weather during the winter (the cold insures the fruitfulness of the trees, if I remember correctly), and this stanza stood out to me.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.

We have been discussing home atmosphere on one of the CM lists and this poem illustrates a point I tried to make in a post, although we were talking about children, not trees.

Our children have thought lives that we do not control. Their hearts, while we can attach them if we love them properly, are theirs as well. Our children have an atmosphere that is theirs, and we can only hope to influence it with our living books and our loving attitudes and our expectations of excellence.

So, if you have been following the discussion at CMSeries, this is what I meant. The Lord does not want us to rest in our own capabilities, or in our curriculum, or in our habits and schedules, but in Him. Something has to be left to God.