And He's watching out for you and me.
Monster #1: So, are you frightened?
Junior: No, not really.
Monster #2: Are you worried?
Junior: Not a bit. I know what ever's gonna happen, That God can handle it.
Back in 1998, or perhaps 99, I caught the veggie tales bug. I remember trying to construct a junior asparagus costume, but that's a highly embarrassing story that's irrelevant here. However the lyrics to the early veggie tales offerings are lodged in my mind in all their tweeness and heavy American ascents. But in the past few years I’ve been revising some of my teen teachings, the things that formed my theology in those years, the light I clung to through the times of confusion and the black and whiteness I was often sold. I've come to realise that the impressions I was sold were often hugely bias. For example, I was not even out of my teen years when I realised that traditional was not the bi-word for boring that the youth events had painted and that the man on the stage could be questioned and found as wanting as the kid in the playground. I must say a lot of the teachings on relationship and work were exercises in piety and guilt much more than their claims to be expressions of ventured for perfection and forgiveness. All things questionable were so often painted in pure black and avoidance and naïvety lifted up, rather than restraint and deliberate innocence. Whole sermons become glib and self serving in my memory, and then I realised that much children's work does the same. I read back these lyrics now with horror, for God is bigger indeed, he is watching indeed, and he can more than handle it, but that doesn't mean little junior asparagus can! Sure god is bigger but the world is still scary and fear is a good thing, we are told 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom' (psalm 111:10), fear is necessary, however unresisting it may be. Their lives will experience loss, bereavement, great evils of life. We need to give them more than glib answers, more than guardian angels. We need to educate them to cope with the world we have, not the world as God would like it.