The Lord is My Shield.

Every weekend while Jesse naps, Theo gets to watch a film. He's four, and like most young boys he's obsessed with cars, so almost without fail it's Pixar's Cars. There are worse things to sit through on a loop.

There's one bit he used to dread. A giant combine harvester that comes out of the dark and chases the main characters across a field. It genuinely frightened him, so for months we'd skip it.

But more recently, something changed. He doesn't want to skip it anymore. He wants to watch it. He just wants to watch it from behind me.

He shuffles in close, tucks himself against my side, and keeps his eyes on the screen through the whole thing. The combine still roars. They still run away. But he watches it now, because he isn't watching it alone.

I read Proverbs 30:5 this week and thought of him on that sofa. "He is a shield to those who take refuge in him."

I think I've had the shield backwards. I've treated God's protection as the thing that lets me avoid what scares me, skip the hard scene, fast-forward past the fear.

But a shield was never meant to keep a soldier out of the battle. It's what lets them walk into it.

David didn't hide in a cave the day he faced Goliath. He walked out into the valley with no armor and said the battle belongs to the Lord.

Knowing God as his shield didn't move him away from the giant. It moved him toward it.

God being my refuge doesn't mean I'll spend my life hiding from every combine harvester that comes over the hill. It means I can face them. Eyes open. Because I'm not facing them by myself.

Theo doesn't need me to skip it anymore. He just needs me next to him. And that's the shift I want in my own faith.

Not asking God to fast-forward past everything that frightens me or worries me, but staying close enough to Him that I can finally watch, and not look away.