He held his little girl on his lap by the campfire. A big, strong cowboy raised by a hard daddy. “I don’t believe in scaring kids,” he said. “My daughter won’t be playing that “Scare” game.”
I’d grown up with the Scare game, and terror filled me each time Scare happened. The game occurred every summer at our cabin. Dark would fall and fathers fueled by alcohol would hide in the meadow and surrounding woods waiting for us kids to find them. Huddled together, we kids would tiptoe along, out of our heads with fear, looking for the wild-eyed daddies and the bears. To my great relief, we never crossed paths with a bear, but the daddies scared the dickens out of me on countless occasions.
I’ll never forget what I felt when that daddy by the campfire said his little girl would not be playing Scare. The same kind of feeling came over me when I lived in Germany and got on the wrong bus one day. I did not speak German and couldn’t communicate how lost I was until I finally found someone who spoke English and pointed the way home for me in a language I understood.
The day I realized that not everybody played Scare was like that for me. Some lucky little girls lived their whole lives protected from that exciting, but awful game. Right then I made the decision that when I had children, they would not play Scare. The man with the little girl on his lap at the campfire was a road map of sorts, a way to a place I’d never been before. I began watching this man’s family at a distance. He was the only daddy I knew who went to church with his wife. I never heard him cuss and I never saw a beer in his hand. I’m sure he wasn’t perfect, but his three little daughters looked so secure in his quiet wake.
When I first began noticing road map people like this man, I didn’t understand them, but they were lights on the trail that kept me headed in the direction I wanted to go. The more I followed these lights, the brighter the path became. One day I finally realized that it wasn’t these road map people I was after, it was the God they served.
Joshua from the Bible knew the value of road maps: he followed Moses wherever he went. Elisha pursued Elijah. Timothy trailed Paul. John the Baptist had his followers and then there was Jesus… “In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” John 1:4-5.
There’s a whole lot of darkness in the world. We all need road maps to find our way. Today, I have a handful of people in my life that I watch and follow: my prayer partners, godly older women, empty-nest parents who raised their kids the right way. I go to these people seeking advice and encouragement and above all, prayer.
And to my great relief, my children have never played Scare. This summer at our cabin (the cabin built the year I was born), while sitting at the campfire as the shadows grew long after sunset, a huge bear stepped into the meadow. Because I’d followed a road map years earlier, our children sat safely beside the fire as the bear passed by.