When can be a dangerous word. I will start eating less when… I will start exercising more when… I will get that done when…

As a child, “when” was scary. When my father was in a bad mood he donned a white glove and gave the deteriorating antebellum house which was more than a hundred years old and falling apart around us from age and neglect (bees lived in the walls upstairs and the roof was missing from one of the downstairs rooms) the “white glove test.” He would run the tips of his fingers over the top of the mantel where none of us could reach except for him and then blast all of us—including my petite, overworked mother—for our slovenly housekeeping.

Then he employed a deplorable method of punishment for us children who ranged in age from teenage me down to about four. He ordered us into a straight line and made us stand on that line until one of us would confess to whatever other infractions he imagined we had committed. Being the oldest and strongest, I was fairly immune to the belting that targeted the first child to become too tired to stand any longer.

The adult me looks back on those marathons of abuse and deplores my apathy. I wish had been stronger and possessed more integrity; that I had stood in the gap for my younger siblings and had taken the punishment for them or defended them from the injustice. Unfortunately, I did neither. Instead, I was relieved to have escaped the belt welts…this time. It was a short-lived relief. “When” came again and again.

“When” still challenges me. Sometimes it frustrates me. When spring comes again—but it’s so slow. When it’s summer—but it never is summer here in Scotland. When it warms up—which it doesn’t here in Scotland. But “when” no longer frightens me, because I know God now and I trust Him as the good and kind Heavenly Father He is; a Father who does not abuse and whose timing is always perfect.

“To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted…a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has put eternity in their hearts.” Ecclesiastes, Chapter Three.

While I am alive, God is with me. He lives in my heart. When I die, I will be with God. That takes the danger and fear out of the word “when.”

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