My favorite fireworks story to tell is the time our family sought the perfect spot to watch a July 4th celebration over downtown Birmingham.
Daddy pulled to the side of the road on top of a viaduct to give us a decent-but-distant view of the Birmingham skyline from our cream-colored, four-door Oldsmobile. After he parked, he got out of the car to see if he could bend back some bushes to improve our line of sight. I’m not sure any of us were paying him much attention until we saw him sprinting back to the car, chased by two very menacing, very loud guard dogs! There was a “No Trespassing” sign he either hadn’t noticed or didn’t take seriously. My brothers and I had never seen Daddy move so fast! The memory still makes us laugh.
Daddy didn’t always choose free seats for fireworks watching. Some years we paid for tickets to see Birmingham Barons baseball with fireworks following the game. Other years we bought our own fireworks and shot them at home from the top of our driveway. We launched bottle rockets from mom’s Mason jars, spelled our name with sparklers and held Roman candles as jets of light shot high, like spells cast from the wands of wizards during the Battle of Hogwarts.
I wanted Abby Kate and Lily to experience the simple fun of fireworks the same way my brothers and I did, from a glass bottle or jar or held (safely) in their hands. So we drove to my mother-in-law’s home in rural Mississippi where there was plenty of room to shoot and the noise wouldn’t bother anybody. We visited a local fireworks stand and paid a whopping $10.97 for bottle rockets, sparklers and those tadpole-shaped things that snap and pop when you pitch them to the ground.
Whatever spirit the girls lacked in mixing homemade ice cream (see last week’s writing) they more than made up for with old-school fireworks. They loved lighting the fuse on the bottle rockets and watching them launch into the night sky. They swish-and-flicked their sparklers, writing their names and starting mock lightsaber battles. They played the way I did when I was their age, when life was simple and summer was slow.
Now that I’m a mom watching fireworks, whether backyard blasts or a professional display, I often find myself looking away from the fireworks and focusing instead on Abby Kate and Lily’s enchanted faces. Their eyes fill with awe and delight, and I understand why Jesus says the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.
Fireworks have taught me something else about faith this summer and that is you have to look up to see them. Look up. Those two words remind me of Psalm 121:
“I lift my eyes toward the mountains.
Where will my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to slip;
your Protector will not slumber.
Indeed, the Protector of Israel
does not slumber or sleep.
The Lord protects you;
the Lord is a shelter right by your side.
The sun will not strike you by day
or the moon by night.
The Lord will protect you from all harm;
He will protect your life.
The Lord will protect your coming and going
both now and forever.”
My life feels really vulnerable right now for a lot of reasons, especially as the girls begin a new school year. Lily leaves the comfort of elementary school to start 6th grade in August. Abby Kate is in the throes of middle school and all the social anxieties that come with 8th grade. Faith feels precarious as what-ifs and worst-cases creep into my thoughts. Fear and worry chase me, very menacing, very loud like those two dogs that nipped at daddy. So, I run. Into God’s presence. The Hills. My Help.
Does your faith feel wobbly today, too? I encourage you to take a cue from summer fireworks shows. Your faith, however feeble, can be a bright spot, piercing the darkness. Look up. Keep looking up. And rest in the wonder and peace of God’s promises.
