the fall

The clock read 1:27. I pulled back the covers and slid down out of my loft bed, and padded across the room to where my nephew Peter was on the floor in his red monkey pajamas. He was crying in a little heap beside the bed where he had been sleeping. He wasn't really awake, and I was reeling from the deep sleep I had been nestled in, but I didn't have to think about what to do. I pulled him into my lap, and he put his head on my shoulder and his arms around me, kneeling on my lap. I rocked him gently, and stood to lift him back onto the bed, where I covered him with the blanket and climbed up beside him to let him fall asleep with a familiar hand on his arm. Within moments, his breathing was even; he didn't stir as I slipped my hand off of his shoulder and stretched my feet to the floor and climbed back into my own bed.

The trust of a child: the sweetness and the grave and terrible responsibility of being trusted, and the freedom of being like a child myself, fully trusting in God's presence and goodness even when I fall out of bed.