Contrary to initial impressions, bus drivers must do a lot more than just keep that big yellow monster between the center line and the ditch on the right-hand side, stop kids from sticking gum all over the seats, and intimidate drivers of subcompact cars. I have learned that they must also have cat-like reflexes and quick wits. In particular, they have to master the Kindergartner Grab.
You see, there are different rules for kindergartners and first graders on a bus. You can only let the youngest riders off of the bus at the stop if there is someone waiting there for them. So ya gotta know your kids, know who they are, know their parents and big brothers or sisters or anyone else who waits at the stop for them. And since the littlest ones are the most excited of all, excited to come home every day bearing those big pictures of impossibly yellow suns beaming down squiggly rays on unbelievably green grass and smiling stick figures to tape on the refrigerator, they forget and try to run down the steps and off the bus as soon as the door opens: So you grab them with a one-armed tackle that would impress a pro wrestler or an NFL linebacker. Or you snatch them back by using the First-Grader Handle, that little rubber loop on top of the backpack that allows you to yank fleeing charges back with a quick jerk.
And you don't let them go until you have identified and acknowledged the specific person who you are releasing the kid to. This is a rule than can't be broken, and any bus driver can tell you horror stories entitled The Day School Let Out Early Due to Bad Weather and Half the Kindergartner Parents Were Not There and its sequel Driving Little Kids Back to The School To Wait on Parents to Come Pick Them Up (In 3D). Safety is sacrosanct, and if it is not safe to let them go YOU CAN NOT. Regardless of how much they may want to leave the bus, no matter how much you hold the line of other kids up, you can't do anything else except match them up one by one.
I know that I need to remember this for my own life, that sometimes I may feel stifled in reaching a goal or frustrated in not getting something I need or want. It is then that I need to recall that sometimes I am in the same situation as those kindergartners; it is not safe, it is not time, or it is not right yet. Although I want to bound off the bus and dart across the intersection without heed for anything other than my need to get home and show off my new popsicle-stick sculpture, someone else is holding me, restraining me, yanking me back by the handle on my backpack or throwing a blocking arm across my way. It may not be safe, or the time may not be reached yet, or it may just not be right for me, or I simply may not be able to understand the real situation any more than those kids can understand the true danger of impulsiveness.
One of my favorite images of God is that presented in Luke 13:34 and Matthew 23:37. In the midst of condemning Jerusalem for its killing of prophets and its unwillingness to obey God and let itself be taken care of, the verse presents God not as a stern-visaged, bearded patriarch casting thunderbolts like Zeus in a Greek myth, but as very motherly:
How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling.
Hmmm...God as a mother hen gathering her chicks under her sheltering wing..yeah....I like that. That's how it feels sometimes, just let me remember that when I feel His hand yank me back onto the bus.
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