Two year old children do not often go quietly into any good night. That truth being instantiated recently, a dad lies down with his toddler son, attempting to apply the sedative of presence.
“Dad, there are two dragons on the ceiling.”
“No, son, that’s a ceiling fan.”
“No. They are dragons.”
Dad offers quiet assurances while demonstrating that he is irrefutably correct by reaching over and turning on the fan.
Astonished and gleeful, the son replies: “Dad, you turned the dragons into a fan!”
The chronicler’s final chapter of Asa’s reign in Judah (2 Chronicles 16) is one of my favorite passages in scripture. In the previous 2 chapters, Asa is perfect at trusting God. But in this chapter he consistently abandons faith, each failure comprising 1 of 4 parallel micronarratives. The longest story culminates in Asa selling items from the temple in exchange for mercenary help from Syria. His plan works flawlessly, resulting in the withdrawal of Israel (the northern kingdom). But in the second narrative the prophet Hanani tells Asa that Syria, a much greater threat than Israel, and now emboldened, is the enemy he could have defeated had he trusted God. God had a plan for solving Syria before Asa knew it was a problem.
We see dragons, God turns them into fans, and we didn’t even know we were warm. All it takes from us is trusting the same God who comforts us every night and wakes us every morning.
To a week of faith.