There is a playground in the back streets of Sandringham where a small, everyday miracle has been happening for decades.
At some point in the 1990s, a few Tonka trucks appeared in the sandpit of a local park. No one remembers exactly when they arrived, or who the original benefactor was. The trucks aren’t tied down. Anyone could take them home if they wanted to. But for about 30 years, they have remained in the sandpit for generations of kids to enjoy.
When they first came to my attention—in a brief good-news story in a local paper—it occurred to me that the trucks are more than just a gift to the children who enjoy them at the playground. Perhaps the greater gift, I thought, has been to the parents and grandparents who come along with them.
I imagined the hundreds of conversations and teaching moments the trucks might have inspired when it was time to go home and leave them in the sandpit. More than just playthings, these unassuming toys have been quietly imparting valuable lessons in sharing, generosity and the common good, nurturing better instincts and encouraging trust, the glue that holds community together.
Rather than vanquishing FOMO, parenthood can just shift its focus as our anxieties transfer from ourselves to our children, intensifying in the process.
Small signs of trust such as these provide a much-needed antidote to ‘FOMO’, the dreaded fear of missing out. While the acronym is relatively new, the fear is as old as humanity. From the time we are toddlers, it haunts us, that sickening realisation that someone else might beat us to the thing we desperately want, grabbing it first. The instinctive response is to shove, grasp and acquire—lunging for the prized chocolate crackles at the birthday party, nabbing the front seat of the car before our siblings can get there, queuing for hours for concert tickets, rushing out to buy the latest iPhone or limited-edition Nikes, anxiously monitoring our investments.
For many of us, the experience of marrying and becoming parents might seem, at first, to mitigate this instinct, inspiring us to live more selflessly and put the needs of our loved ones before ourselves. But rather than vanquishing FOMO, I’ve discovered, parenthood can just shift its focus as our anxieties transfer from ourselves to our children, intensifying in the process.
Lying awake in the small hours, fixating on geopolitical chaos and looming economic scarcity, it’s hard not to worry about our children’s futures, the adversities they might suffer and the opportunities they might miss out on. What are we to do with the deep dread and unnerving sense of helplessness that these thoughts can inspire?
One response is to ‘helicopter parent’ our kids, hovering over them as we put strategies in place to protect them from every imaginable risk and danger, stage-managing and scheduling their lives so that every waking moment is filled with an educational or enriching opportunity. We tell ourselves that with enough planning, and by allocating sufficient resources, we can control the outcome. But we can’t. And in the process, we run the risk of making our kids less robust, not more.
None of this is to say that parents shouldn’t take the sacred responsibilities of parenthood—to love, guide, teach and protect—very seriously. Creating safe and nurturing homes and setting appropriate boundaries are, of course, important. But parents also need to teach their children, as they grow into adulthood, how to function and flourish in an uncertain, unpredictable world, a world that can be simultaneously dangerous and miraculous.
In the face of uncertainty and upheaval, Scripture tells us over and over not to fear but to trust. It also tells us that where we put our trust matters.
One of the lessons both of the Bible and of history is that humans can be inspiring and innovative, generous and good, but they can also be mean-spirited and very disappointing.
One of my grandmothers was in the habit of praying for all her grandchildren’s future spouses. As a teenager, I would roll my eyes. But while I might not have admitted it then, I found the thought of her stubborn prayers strangely reassuring.
So while it’s heartening to find the trucks still in the sandpit, the reality is that even after 30 years, the experiment could still go wrong. There is no ironclad guarantee that they will still be there tomorrow. Faced with a tired, fractious four-year-old reluctant to be dragged away from the sandpit, what do we say? Do we tell her that people’s generosity can always be counted on, that the trucks will certainly be there when she comes back to play with them tomorrow? What if they’re not?
Growing up, I was blessed to have adults in my life who had the humility to see that they couldn’t control my future, and the wisdom to trust me and my life to God. That trust often took the form of prayer.
One of my grandmothers was in the habit of praying for all her grandchildren’s future spouses. As a teenager, I would roll my eyes. You don’t know if I’ll even get married, I would say. And she didn’t. That was the point. She had no idea if, or who, I would marry, but she prayed about it regardless. She couldn’t control the outcome or guarantee my future happiness, so she trusted it to God. While I might not have admitted it then, I found the thought of her stubborn prayers strangely reassuring. I still do.
Many years later, after my share of romantic detours and heartbreaks, I was finally able to introduce her to the man she had been praying for since he was a small child. She celebrated with us on our wedding day and died just a couple of weeks before the birth of our first child.
Real trust, prayerful trust, is self-perpetuating. Knowing that my husband was prayed for and trusted to God for all those years by Gran—and by other faithful, prayerful members of his own family—is hugely reassuring. It strengthens my own trust, in God certainly, but also in my husband and in our marriage, especially in the challenging moments that every couple encounters.
When we take the risk of love, there will almost certainly be tears. But we will never be abandoned by a God who has faced all our worst fears.
Growing up, I didn’t always give my parents good reason to trust me. Instead, they took the wiser course, trusting me to God, who knows me and my needs better than they ever will, and who could be relied on never to give up on me, even in my most hideous teenage moments.
Trusting is hard, and sometimes my parents did it better than at other times. But here’s the weird thing: the more they trusted me to God, the more I felt trusted by them.
As they brought their fears to God, their anxious prayers gradually turned peaceful, and that peace flowed into their parenting. They let me take more risks, gave me more opportunities to spread my wings. Not wanting to betray that trust, my own desire to be trustworthy grew. Seeing the fruits of their prayerfulness, I tentatively offered by own prayers, learning to put my life in God’s hands, just as they had.
Trust is the glue that holds communities together. To live in happy, flourishing societies, we need to be able to trust each other. But how? When we read the news or watch a loved one weeping in pain or heartbreak, fear seems so rational. But it is also what causes trust to fray and community to unravel. As fear and distrust spiral, how do we break the pattern?
People often talk about earning trust, but at the end of the day, trust—like those Tonka trucks—is a gift. It blesses and restores, not just ourselves and those closest to us, but everyone in the playground.
As Gran learnt over her 90 years—through world wars, economic depression, family tragedies and grave illness, as well as many great joys—the solution is to find somewhere else to put our trust, somewhere solid and unassailable. She and my parents taught me that only when we learn to trust everything, and everyone, in our lives to God can we truly find the strength and security we need to take the very real risk of loving and trusting others.
When we take the risk of love, there are no guarantees. There will almost certainly be tears. But we will never be abandoned by a God who has faced all our worst fears, plumbing the depths of suffering and abandonment out of love for us, overcoming it all—even death—on the cross. Where there is love like this, there is always hope.
People often talk about earning trust, but at the end of the day, trust—like those Tonka trucks—is a gift. It blesses and restores, not just ourselves and those closest to us, but everyone in the playground.
