Welton Gaddy told the children that he’d seen something brown and furry with a big, bushy tail playfully jumping from limb to limb in the trees in his front yard that morning.  He was the pastor of the Broadway Baptist Church in Ft. Worth at the time and that’s how he’d started his children’s sermon one Sunday.  He then asked the girls and boys if any of them knew what kind of creature that was playing in the trees.  A little girl popped up and said, “I think you want me to say it was Jesus but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me.”

Within the Christian community there is a growing chorus of censure of the Harry Potter books and the new movie based on those books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  In this, its first weekend, The Sorcerer’s Stone has already broken all box office debut records.  I wonder if we might do well to ask the children what they see since they made it all so popular.  They might surprise us.  They might say something like, “I think they’re trying to do magic but it sure looks like just a movie to me.”  That’s about what my twelve year-old said when I asked him.  He’s devoured each of the Potter books while they were still steaming hot off the press.  He knows it’s all just a story.  Just like I grew up knowing that The Wizard of Oz was all make-believe yet also believing, at the same time, that Jesus could make me new.  At the ripe old age of eight, I knew the difference between fable and fact.

Is it possible that the teaspoon of make-believe sorcery in Potter is not nearly as destructive as the tablespoons of fear with which some parents have responded to it?  Children tend to take seriously what their parents do.  When it’s all said and done, will they remember the substance of fear their parents assigned to him long after they’ve forgotten Harry Potter? 

If our children were interviewed next Sunday about what they will experience in our homes this next week how would they respond?  During the children’s sermon, the preacher says, “At your house this past Thursday, there was turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce.  What was that anyway?”  Would any of our children respond by saying, “I think you want me to say Thanksgiving, but it tasted like fear to me.”  It is an interesting phenomenon.  Children know the difference between fact and fantasy more than we credit them.  Like they know the difference between parents who say Thanksgiving prayers once a year but who lead every day more by fear than gratitude. 

Should we make it our mission to rid the world of every semblance evil so our children will be safe?  Or should we be about equipping our children to face evil with hope and faith?  It’s kind of like asking if it’s wiser to try to rid the world of the oceans so our children won’t ever drown or wiser to teach them how to swim.  When the apostle Paul was nearing the end of his life and ministry, he was more interested in equipping than ridding.  He knew he couldn’t protect his spiritual children from evil or rid the world of the oceans of it.  So, he became more interested in teaching them to swim, in giving them the buoyancy of character.  He said that he had “not stopped praying for (them) and asking God to fill (them) with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding . . . (that they might) live a life worthy of the Lord and . . . please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that (they might) have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks.”  He couldn’t protect his children from evil.  So, he asked God to give them a character that would enable them to respond in faith rather than react in fear. 

For far too many families, when Thanksgiving dinner is served, it will taste like fear.  My experience has been that, in most cases, the prevailing emotion for most parents is fear.  And, I say that by way of confession, not censure.

We are so afraid.  We’re afraid of car wrecks and teenage pregnancy and drugs and bad grades and whether our kids will get into the best universities and then the best sororities or fraternities and whether they’ll get to start or have to sit the bench.  We’re afraid they won’t choose the right career so they’ll make lots of money and find the social acceptance only money can buy.  We’re afraid they won’t fit in or afraid they’ll not be themselves and fit in too much.  We’re afraid we’ll die and leave them helpless or we’re afraid they won’t know when it’s time to stop depending on us. 

So, what is it we want to give our children anyway?  A perfectly safe life and world or the kind of character that will sustain them no matter what happens to them in a world we can neither predict nor control?  A character shaped by knowledge of God’s will, spiritual wisdom and understanding, a life worthy of the Lord’s name, one that bears the fruit of goodness and love, one growing in the knowledge of God and daily strengthened by his power within them or one always at the mercy of whatever happens next?  If we can only work effectively toward one of those, which would we rather it be?

If the apostle’s words are our pattern, while guaranteeing our children neither safety or protection are our options, we are not helpless.  There is something we can do.  We can invoke the very real power of God by praying for our children.  Not a power that magically alters the world of evil or pain or loss according to their will but a power that infuses them with God’s very character to live meaningfully in what can be a very scary world.  “Since the day we heard about you,” the apostle said, “we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you.”  Since the first day, he said, we haven’t stopped. 

Do you remember the very first day you saw your children?  The day they were born or came into your home through adoption?  Do you remember?  How could you forget?  Do you remember the first time you had to leave them with a babysitter?  Do you remember their first day of school?  Do you remember that helpless feeling of slowly but surely having to let them go?  What did you do in each of those moments?  I mean, after you finished crying?  What did you do?  Didn’t you pray?  Didn’t you ask God to watch over them and be with them?  Didn’t you ask his guidance and protection?  No matter how old they may get, nothing will change the fact that you can pray for what you cannot control.  You can still use each little urge to fear and grieve as a reminder to pray. 

How did the parents of those two girls who were imprisoned in Afghanistan survive?  What happens to two young girls in an Afghanistani prison anyway?  What do you do if your daughter is thousands of miles from your protection and care?  Well, their parents prayed.  They reached across miles of desert and oceans of time and wrapped their loving arms of prayer around their daughters.  And, it worked.  Not so much because they were freed.  But, because, though imprisoned, they were not enslaved.  They came out with their character and hope intact.  Despite their hellish environment, they were strengthened.  They grew in the knowledge of God.  They were able to endure and be patient.  They even emerged joyfully giving thanks.  Because of prayer, what God was doing in them was more significant than what others were doing to them. 

No one who wants guarantees would ever become a parent.  But, no parent who truly loves his child, in Christ, will ever stop praying that God would always have his way in them more than the world has its way with them.  A good Thanksgiving prayer for parents:  “Dear God, may my child always be more grateful for what you are doing in them than they are bitter about what might happen to them.”

The first Thanksgivings were genuinely spiritual celebrations.  In the winter of 1621, almost half of the colonists who had settled at Plymouth were dead.  But, that summer, grateful for what God had done in spite of what they’d lost, governor William Bradford led the colonists in a harvest festival.  They had suffered catastrophically.  But, they chose to celebrate the goodness of God and his blessings nonetheless.  Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a day of national Thanksgiving.  The year was 1863.  The Civil War was still raging.  People were dying by the thousands on battlefields all across the nation.  The stability of the Union was still hanging in the balance.  But, Lincoln wanted the nation never to forget the goodness of God despite the evil of men.  You can always be “joyfully giving thanks” when the evil of the world around only serves as a reminder of the goodness of God in you and to you. 

Growing up, I only saw The Wizard of Oz a few times.  It almost always came on while we were at church on Sunday night.  But, to this day, one of my favorite parts was when Toto got away from Dorothy.  He ran ahead of her and pulled the curtain back behind which the wizard was hiding and Dorothy discovered the wizard for what he was.  Just another man who knew how to work the right levers and buttons, who knew how to work the smoke and mirrors, and who also who flew away in a big balloon when things got tough and left them to find their own way home.  But, it was just a story.  Interestingly, what was written only as myth to entertain me eventually gave me another way of understanding truth.

By the way, what would happen if Christians used the Potter event as a bridge?  What if we invited people to dialogue about what makes stories of magic so appealing?  Like Paul at Athens, what if we used what people already believed as a stepping stone opportunity for sharing with them what we believe?  “‘Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious,’” Paul said.  “‘For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.  Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you (Acts 17:22-23).’”  What if we used this opportunity to respond in grace to people whose natural curiosity about spirituality has been awakened instead of reacting with censure because they didn’t get it exactly right the very first time?

You see, at the same time I was viewing Oz and only being entertained by it, my parents were telling me another story and I was being saved by it.  My grandparents and Sunday School teachers were telling me the same story, too.  A true story.  The story of the God who, in Christ, “has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”  Toto ran ahead and pulled the curtain back on the wizard.  In Christ, God has pulled the curtain of heaven back to reveal himself.  And, he has not made us come crawling to him for mercy so we could find our way home.  God, in Christ, left his home in heaven, came to us, showed us the way home and promised to come back and take us there to be with him someday (John 14:2-3). 

My parents knew they couldn’t keep me from falling in over my spiritual head someday.  So, they taught me to swim.  They gave me a faith that always buoys me from within no matter what storm rages around.  A faith that helps me sort the fact of God’s grace from the fiction that my sin is my hopeless end.  A faith that, no matter what, the God who has come in Christ will always love me.  And, when I die, no matter how I die, he’ll be there then, too.  To hold my hand as I take my very last breath here so that my next breath will fill my lungs with heaven’s pure air.  To love me.  To save me.  To take me home.  I’m joyfully giving thanks.  Because what God is doing in me and through me is greater than anything the world can ever do to me.

That sounds too good to be true.  That the God of the universe loves me.  The God who can flick his fingernails and send sparks of meteors crashing through earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour giving me a predawn light show greater than any digitally manufactured magic – that God loves me.  Enough to forgive me all my sin.  And, show me the way home when I’m lost and even come to take me there himself.  If I didn’t know better, believe better, I’d think it was just a story.  It looks like just a story.