One Sunday afternoon in Uganda, while on his bicycle, my eleven-year-old was hit by a motorcycle. 

I didn’t expect the stranger at the gate, or my weeping son, clutching his shoulder, a tear in the new shirt his grandma had brought over from the U.S. His mangled front wheel unsettled me. 

Congregated neighbors at the intersection made me jittery. Past experiences cause me to associate African mobs at accidents with trouble. I waved and shouted my thanks, stomach clutching in cultural bewilderment. 

I was unhinged. What kind of mother was I? My husband was in Kenya… Should I take my son for X-rays? Was I foolish not to? Malfunctioning ATM card = zero cash… What if my son had stopped a second later, a foot further?

I prayed with the kids, voice throaty and breaking as I held my son in the cool of the hall. Today’s verse clanged in my mind. 

What I know: God responds to Job speaking of boundaries He sets for the sea. I imagine Him setting His palm’s great blade on a beach. On everything, from the wind to a deer’s gestation, He places boundaries. 

All power and pain are on His leash. You stop here.

I see this in His promise that Abraham’s descendants will return to the Promised Land after four centuries (the Amorites’ sin “is not yet complete”). In His statement to Peter about Satan asking to sift Peter like wheat. In Job, when Satan must present his ideas to God. God hijacks all of this evil for His purposes, His people. 

My problem is always the length of his leash. 

The chaos muted to a dull throb as I held my son. As we talked, I felt a twinge of what I’d prayed for with him: connection. That I would continue to have his heart as he developed into a man. 

I thanked God that today. His leash stopped with an arm treatable with Paracetamol, a repaired bike wheel in my driveway, connecting further with my neighbors and the honorable driver who brought my son home rather than running off, and my son alive, teary, warm. 

That day, God’s leash unfurled to a place I could understand—but was deeply good even when I didn’t have that luxury.