Although our children are well beyond college, I enjoy seeing other families in our neighborhood sending their children off to school.  For most of us, it's an essential rite of passage.  As I observed one of my bicycling buddies take his son for his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin yesterday, I thought about how he and his wife feel, letting go of their oldest child and only son, setting him off on a new journey, a journey from which he will likely emerge definitively separated from them as he begins a new life of his own. It's hard to let go.  Yet it's also hard to hold on.
     It's an apt parable for our lives.  We try so hard to cling to what we know because in that we find security and, for most of us, control.  Conversely, we ought to try equally hard to let go:  security is welcoming, but it only perpetuates what is already there.  The greater challenge is to embrace the unknown.
     So often have I seen my students, most of them believers in God, balance these polar opposites.  It's never easy.  Yet why believe in God if we cannot trust him?