I thought I had experienced fear before, but I hadn’t.

Well, not until last Friday afternoon anyway.

I would describe those 15 minutes as my darkest parenting moment, the closest I’ve ever come to terror. And it came in five simple words:

“Her school is locked down.”

It was my father-in-law on the phone, they were trying to pick my daughter up from school, like they do every Friday.

As his words began to register, I remembered something I’d said to Ben only moments earlier: There are a lot of sirens today.

And suddenly I put it together. They were headed to the school.

We ran to the car and almost instantly my mind filled in the blanks with the worst possible version of what “school lockdown” could mean. It’s amazing how quickly fear does that.
It doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t slowly reason its way into your heart.

In seconds, it can take five words and build an entire future with them. Suddenly I was grieving things that hadn’t happened and imagining things I hadn’t seen.

Fear is fast.
Trust, apparently, is much slower.

As we drove toward the school, there they were; the flashing lights, emergency vehicles and locked school gates. And somewhere behind them was my girl.

I couldn’t think clearly. My brain seemed capable of holding only two thoughts:
Something bad is happening.
And my girl is where the bad thing is.

Did I pray? No. I couldn’t. I could barely speak. I couldn’t put a coherent thought together. But I could feel God. Close. Near. And maybe for the first time I understood what it meant to pray without words. Not because I chose silence, but because I couldn't speak.

I’ll spare you the long minutes. She’s okay, they all are.
The school had locked down in response to an incident outside the grounds.

But something about those 15 minutes has stayed with me, because I saw something in myself that I haven’t been able to shake: how quickly fear got into my heart.

My instinct that afternoon was simple: get to my girl.

If I could just get to her, I could protect her, but I think those 15 minutes exposed something in me, that somewhere deep down, I believe that’s my job. To keep her safe and make sure nothing happens to her. To somehow stand between my children and all the things in this world that could hurt them.

But in reality, I can’t.

And even writing that scares me. Because I wasn’t there, I couldn’t get through the gates, couldn’t control what was happening and couldn’t protect her.

I couldn’t guarantee the outcome.
And that’s what fear hates most; not being in control.

I’ve been thinking about one line from Psalms ever since: “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.”

When.

I think I’ve always imagined trust as the thing that gets rid of fear. That if I really trusted God, I wouldn’t feel afraid. But David doesn’t say if I am afraid. He says when. Apparently fear and trust can exist in the same moment.

Maybe trust isn’t the absence of fear, it’s what I do with my fear when it arrives.
I wish I could say those 15 minutes taught me not to be afraid, but they didn’t. If anything, they showed me just how afraid I can be, how quickly my mind can believe the worst, how much of my peace is built on the illusion that I can keep everyone I love safe and how uninitiated I still am in trusting God.

That’s why “fear not” are some of the hardest words in Scripture. Because fear asks: what if something bad happens? And God doesn’t answer that question by promising that nothing ever will.

That’s the part I find difficult.

He doesn’t promise me a life where my children will never experience pain, he doesn’t give me the certainty fear is asking for. Instead, he says: “Do not fear, for I am with you.”

I think I’ve missed that before.
Not: Do not fear, because nothing bad will happen.

But: Do not fear, for I am with you.

The promise isn’t certainty, it’s presence.

Living as though everything depends on me is exhausting; protect everyone, anticipate every danger, hold it all together.

I can’t. And strangely, there is freedom in finally admitting that.

Not because there's suddenly nothing left to fear but because I was never meant to carry the weight of holding everything together.

I wish I could tell you I understand how to trust God with the people I love most now. I don’t. But somewhere between the sirens, the locked gates and having absolutely no control... he was there.

Close.

And I’m learning to trust that that is enough.