Thinking about the seasons of life, a mom seeks reassurance from her child:
I put my arm around seven-year-old Charlie, seated next to me, and squeezed him tight.
“Will you promise,” I whispered in his ear, “to stay little forever and never leave me?”
“Mom,” he said looking up at me, “I’ve got plans.”
In 1967 when I graduated I went to work at a small company that hired new graduates. Four of the new graduates there happened to be Jewish.
When the 1967 war started in Israel all four of these engineers told their parents they were going to Israel to fight.
Every one of them reported that their parents commanded them to NOT go.
They all went.
We never found out what happened to them. None of them ever came back.
I saw the same sort of thing when the Bosnia war was going on and young Bosnian men were shown lined up at ports in Italy waiting to catch a boat to go join the fight.
You can’t control what your kids are going to do. They’ll have plans of their own.