What is the difference between safety and protection?
Why do we wish safety upon someone instead of their protection?
Is it love to pray for safety, so they will come back to us or is it love to ask that they be torn apart, so they may learn and be satisfied in the new depths they reach but be guarded in the midst?
Protection and safety are barriers from you and something else, the difference lies in the purpose for that barrier.
Safety begs distance, it is a fence that separates and creates fear because it divides. Protection is armor, that begs for action despite fear because it cuts straight into the middle of conflict.
Safety is comfort, protection is hope. Often, prayers for both stem from love.
Safety is comfort that has no worry because the danger is outside the castle walls. Protection is hope in knowing that the armor is strong enough to shield the knight so that they may come home after the battle.
Is that not what we want for someone we love? For ourselves? A battle well fought for the cause of right for which we did not back down? One that was full of the growth in which there is as much pain as there is goodness, that knows muscle must be torn for it to repair stronger?
Or do we want certainty in the return, regardless of the straying from the fight?
Safety is a prayer that the person we love might not suffer, that they might pull through without pain or injury because it hurts us to think that they are hurting. Protection is a prayer for the suffering the loved one faces to be meaningful because it hurts us more to think that the person we love might become stagnant. Though we love them where they are, we want them to be ever-growing.
Safety is momentary and fleeting, protection is long-term.
Too often I pray for safety and not protection for people I love, and for myself. In these times of wishing, hoping, praying for safety, I come to the words of C.S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia,
"Susan is surprised, since she assumed Aslan was a man. She then tells Mr. Beaver, “I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” She asks Mr. Beaver if Aslan is safe, to which Mr. Beaver replies, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King.” -Taken from Desiring God
Aslan; the lion written to mirror God, the Lion and the Lamb. Aslan; the Lion who died on and broke the Stone Table in half, as Jesus died on the cross and tore the veil in the Tabernacle after He rose.
A main distinguisher of safety from protection is the role of fear within the two.
The desire for safety often stems from fear, as well as love. Safety does not directly deal with fear, it merely avoids interaction with it. In this environment, fear thrives because it is caged but it is still roaring and clawing to reach you with pent up rage that desires your destruction. Protection looks fear in the face, sometimes with tears or trembling, to end its prowling in your life because protection is founded upon love that fills our soul to the brim, leaving no room for fear. Protection goes as far as to seek the front-lines because it knows that every wound sustained will be filled with love in their process of healing.
But goodness, where is goodness's role in this?
The goodness in the midst of fear demanding a response is the weaving of God's will throughout what seems to be nonsensical knots of chaos. It is God's will that He is our strength and contentment, our everything, because that way of life keeps us from a life bound to sin by stamping out the root of the original sin that is doubt of God's goodness. So would a battle in which you need be stripped of all but necessity, God, not be entirely beautiful, meaningful, loving, and worthy?
God is our protection because He is so full of a courageous, unrestrained, unashamed, and engaged love that He is like a lion Whose roar pierces the darkness, the absence, the fear that separate us from Him. He will not hesitate to tear apart what comes from Satan that tries to poison us and take us from Him.
He, His Word, His attributes are our armor protecting us from the darkness in life as we walk through it, not a barrier keeping us from it as it runs rampant. God will confidently send us to the ends of the earth because He has told us He will be what we are not, He will always accompany us through the middle of conflict and the depths because suffering, heartache, battles, and monsters will not keep us from Him and they will not be without purpose.
God will not let them keep us from a life saturated in His goodness. He will even show us how the products of everything that "shouldn't be" can be turned back to His will. It may not be in His will that the world be divided by language barriers, misunderstandings, and ignorance, but it is in His will that I learn to love Him and His people deeply, personally, and passionately so He will make me a missionary and a diplomat. He will use the ways in which the world falls short of His glory to show me how to live a life that does not.
I encourage you to learn how to pray for protection with me as we remember the Lion that is so full of love that He is not safe, but He is good.
