Release Date: September 2nd, 2026Our Safest Place
- by Herb Sawatzky
But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
Israel, put your hope in the Lord
both now and forevermore.
Eugene Peterson writes that it is an incredibly difficult thing to calm oneself. It takes a Herculean effort to calm ourselves down. We know that we need to take deep breathes when we are caught up in the middle of it, we tell our kids and our loved ones to do exactly this, and yet when it is our own turn to try and climb up out of the muddle of distress and anguish, we are reminded how immensely difficult it is to stop and take a breath, to slow down our own breathing and calm ourselves down. We know how hard it is to quiet our own souls.
the Christ-like quality children naturally have which we as followers of Jesus are supposed to nurture in our own souls is that of trust
A weaned child, about 3 years old, knows exactly how to calm themselves, and they do not do it by taking deep breaths. Instead, intuitively, instinctively, a stressed child, crying, anxious, hurt, looking for someone to fix what ails them, goes running to their parent. In this psalm they run to their mother. (If, like me, you love finding maternal images of God in the bible – here’s another one!).
Children are not held up as role models of the Christ-following life because they are naturally innocent or pure. Everyone knows they are not. Instead, the Christ-like quality children naturally have which we as followers of Jesus are supposed to nurture in our own souls is that of trust. Children know whom they can (or should be able to) trust.
we run to God to calm our own anxious hearts, our stress-filled minds, our burdened hearts, our weary bodies
My dad was born 8-10 years old when he and his family were refugees in 1944, desperately walking out of Russia ahead of the German and Russian armies. The stories of that time are ones of unimaginable chaos. Earth-shattering disorder. We would sometimes ask dad what it was like at that time, and my dad said, “oh, we were kids, we didn’t have a worry in the world. We just ran around and played. The parents worried, we just played.”
As a parent one of the first things I had to learn was that my kids did not have to like me all the time. They did not have to be happy with me, but they did need to know that I was there for them, all the time. My kids had to know that I had their best interests at heart, and that I was always working for their best. Even when I was wrong, I was working for their very best. This, as every parent knows, is not the same thing as always being liked by our kids.
Like a child that goes to their mother, who is in control of the things that the child cannot control; who provides for the child what the child cannot provide; who looks out for the child where the child cannot look out for themselves; so we run to God to calm our own anxious hearts, our stress-filled minds, our burdened hearts, our weary bodies.
We go to God, not because God will always answer our prayers in the way that we ask God to, but because God is our safest place, our most secure place, the one who gets us through when our cries are not answered as we wish.
- Herb Sawatzky is pastor at Bethany Mennonite Church