I’ve been told Maggie’s former youth pastor would often spot a young person, sit down facing him/her, stare intently, and ask, “What’s your greatest fear?” When Maggie shared this with me recently, I took the opportunity to ask her what her answer would be. She replied, “The deepest part of the ocean. The place Nemo is warned about in ‘Finding Nemo.'” That may be her answer now, but her answer ten or eleven year ago would have been middle-of-the-night bad weather or some other manifestation of an overly active imagination waking her from sleep. The first earth-rattling thunder peal of a storm would start the countdown that launched Maggie from her own bed and propelled her into ours. The last frantic steps would send her airborne to a soft landing between her protectors.

I never minded the visits and secretly missed them when they stopped. I understood the fears all too well. The heaviest traffic pattern in the carpet of my childhood home was worn between my bed and my parent’s. So common were the visits, they would roll out a pallet on their floor whenever there was a possibility that I would awaken them. I personally preferred having Maggie curl her body in close to mine, so we never bothered with a sleeping bag for her. But I took the solace of a campout in the master bedroom.

In the way growing up changes things, the visits stopped, my own and hers. Fears took on a more concrete and less menacing shape that were dealt with in the light of day. Her confidence in her own ability to handle things and her faith in God’s protection grew, as mine had some thirty years before. As parents, we felt competent to keep her safe from her greatest fears, including the deep ocean. Stay away from the water, I told her. It’s easy to avoid the ocean in Hattiesburg. Even our plans to scuba dive one day could be limited to safer, shallower waters. But, as we are now learning, threats don’t always wear familiar or predictable garb.

A one-in-a-million diagnosis was not on my radar. I had never once even considered cancer except to say, “God forbid. I couldn’t deal with that” when hearing of another’s misfortune. That happens to other people’s kids, you know, the one’s on a St. Jude’s telethon. My kids are healthy. I was familiar with catastrophic car wrecks, so I could imagine the twist of metal instantly changing everything. An accident, yes. Cancer, no. Anything easily treatable and fixable with few lasting scars. Something that seemed to, at worst, find it’s way to us while God was caught not looking. Certainly not a malignancy that crept in while He apparently turned His back. A dark place with an unsounded bottom once was far removed from our home. Until now. For once, as parents we are navigating ominous seas with no dependable compass.

We are only beginning to wade in and try to determine just how far away the bottom really is. As we do, we cling to the promise that, although we have never been there or would never choose to go, God is there. And as Maggie approaches without parents who can confidently guide her, God will meet her there. He is King of the highest heaven and the deepest pit. Lord of glorious light as well as the blackest darkness. And when the loudest roll of thunder shakes the foundations of her soul or the deepest pit threatens to engulf, He will curl her into Himself and hold her there.

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39