An exercise in TRUST !

So, tonight my oldest daughter flies out to India for a 2 week trip with ‘World Challenge’ and her school. I am immensely proud of her, she has raised all the money for her trip herself (and I know a lot of the others going had parental contributions!) and even raised enough to pay for her jabs and her kit. She is so excited and I am excited for her.

And right now I feel quite peaceful. Not sure how long that will last… The only contact I will have with her for those 2 weeks is 2 text messages from the team leader, one to say they have landed ok, and the other to say they have finished the trek safely. I don’t think I have ever gone 2 weeks without seeing her, let alone speaking to her. When on honeymoon we were away for a week without her but we spoke to her every day. So 2 weeks with not so much as a phone call… phew. hard.

And of course there are all the dangers, the diseases, the potential for harm. You know when you have jabs for foreign diseases it really doesn’t do, to look up all those diseases! So I have to put my trust in the 3 leaders going with them to keep them safe. To put my trust in my 16 year old to be sensible. And above all, to put my trust in God to watch over her. Before she went God gave me a psalm for her which I scribbled out parts of and hid in her rucksack! and I do feel a sense of peace right now. I have wondered if I am a bit odd in that right now I am not that worried about it, my daughter going off to foreign climes, should I be more worried, should I be concerned, should I be spending the next 2 weeks on my knees praying for her safe return?

But I guess it just shows that I am trusting God with her safety. And that feels like a huge blessing. It’s one thing to say we put our trust in God but another to do it when it matters. And right now feels like one of those times. There is absolutely nothing I can do for the next 2 weeks, she will be half way round the world and no way I can contact her, so I just have to trust.

My Dad reminded me yesterday that at 19 I went off to Australia for a year and that India wasn’t that far, nor was it as long a trip. At the time I didn’t even consider how they felt, I just wanted to get as far away as I could! and I am now feeling rather guilty that I phoned them so infrequently to let them know how I was. In fact it was on that trip that my daughter was conceived, and now here she is, off on her own travels. Time is so fleeting.

Really I know that this is just the start of something. Before long she will be off to college, uni, she will have her own life away from us. And then there will be time for so much more trust!

So for now, my prayer is that the sense of peace I have now, will continue until her return. And that she will have the most amazing, life changing trip.