Can something be wild yet still be good?  Of course.  As I was walking through a newly established forest preserve recently, I noticed, as the path wound into the forest, a neatly manicured lawn, spreading expansively around a rather large house, standing in stark contrast to the wildness of the meadows, lakes, and trees just beyond it.  The difference was striking:  on the one side, all that is safe and secure; on the other, everything that is wild and unknown, separated by an arbitrary property line.
     As I looked at this divide, I thought about a line from the British writer C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.  In it, a character is talking about the lion Aslan who, as readers of the Chronicles know, is an image or picture of the Christian God and his love for humanity.   Aslan, the person says, "Is not safe, but he is good."  How true.  Like the forest preserve, with its mystery and challenges, perhaps God is not wholly safe; perhaps he is a more harrowing adventure than the safe and ordered manicured lawn.  Perhaps.  On the other hand, we could wander through manicured lawns, of any kind, all of our lives, and never really understand what life is about.  We might not know disturbance and pain, but we would also not know the more fundamental dimensions of this finite existence.
     So it is with God.  Not believing in him seems safe.  We do not need to change our world in any way.  Yet given life's puzzles and conundrums, maybe we should consider that it is better to embrace the "unsafe" in order to find the deeper goodness in this existence we share.  It is only in the challenges of the wild that we find what is truly good.