I lowered my visor, adjusted my sun glasses, and sunk into a folding chair as the sand exfoliated my bare feet. I was happy that my flip-flop tan would not be undone in a single day at the beach and hopeful that the subtle outline would remind me of these carefree days when I traded my flip-flops for sensible heels in just over a week. Back to school. Back to work. Back to the chaos of fall.

But for now, the beach.

As the kids jumped waves and rode swells, I whispered prayers of thanksgiving for my four blonde babies who were now old enough to venture into the salty foam without me and wondered if they would ever be so old that I would stop counting heads altogether.

Nope, never.

One… two… three… four… on repeat, for eternity.

It’s what moms do. We count heads and scan the horizon for danger and make mental lists of worst case scenarios while our kids run carefree into the wide, wild world.

After all, if we can anticipate all of the potential dangers, we can harness our motherly powers to protect our children from them, right? But the beach is our war on terror, and today’s threats were many:

• Drowning (Stay together. Hold hands. Don’t go deeper than your toenails.)
• Jellyfish (Watch where you step. Always watch where you step!)
• Sunburn (Reapply sunscreen every hour. No, not like that. Here, just let me do it.)
• Sharks (Don’t sing Baby Shark! They might hear you! Is that a shadow or a fin?)
• Flesh-eating bacteria (Yes, I looked up beach reports this morning, but what if they were wrong?)
• Deadly sand (A father in Somewheresville died last week when a wave caught him off guard and he hit his head on the hard sand. Respect the sand, people!)

On the outside, I was all smiles and sandcastles, but on the inside, the what-ifs scrolled through my head like fine print on a pharmaceutical ad.

I popped in my earbuds and pressed play, hoping to drown out the worry. Wait – why did I have to use the word drown? Now I’m back at the top of my threat list. Eventually, however, it worked, and I realized I had found the perfect solution to combine summer reading (one of my favorite things ever!) with keeping vigil over my children’s lives – audiobooks! I allowed the narrator to lull me in and could feel the tension in my shoulders slowly escape into the sticky, salty air.

The calm didn’t last.

About twenty minutes in, after counting heads yet again, I suddenly jumped to my feet with the realization that I had naively overlooked one of the most pressing hazards of all, and even now, my children were succumbing to its danger.

The danger of the drift.

When they’d ventured out into the waves, they had been directly in front of me; now, they were easily fifty yards to my right, oblivious that they had drifted so far away.

The currents don’t announce themselves like warriors throwing battle cries across enemy lines. Instead, they move in secret, patiently working below the surface to lure innocent beach goers away from home base, inch by dangerous inch.

Until it’s too late.

Once I realized what was happening, I easily remedied the situation. Every twenty minutes or so, I’d walk the shoreline, join my kids in the salty water, and make them look at landmarks along the coast to see how far away they’d gone. Then we’d swim in, walk back to our beach towels, and they’d start their adventure all over again.

This is what motherhood is all about, I concluded.

If we’re not careful, we spend all of our energy worrying about obvious enemies that threaten to take our children down—drugs, alcohol, immorality, atheism, predators, illnesses, accidents—and we forget that one of the biggest dangers they face is lurking just below the surface, patiently luring our children farther and farther away from the truth of God’s Word.

It’s the danger of the spiritual drift.

I imagine that when Satan strategizes to bring down Christian children, he rarely bothers with full-on attacks. Obvious attacks, he knows, can easily be countered. What’s harder for parents to fight are the blows they never see. The subtle, small attacks that happen when everyone is distracted.

He knows that Christian children belong to God. He can’t undo that, so why try? But if he can get them to drift away from God… Now, he’s making progress.

Parents can work against this slow drift towards apathy by regularly joining their children where they are, helping them to identify landmarks, and leading them back towards the home base of truth.

When we bring our children to church, pray with them before bed, address sin, read the Bible to them, play Christian radio, listen to their problems, or offer biblical wisdom, we’re fighting the spiritual drift.

Every little step forward matters, because neutral is not an option. Neutral, because of the drift, is the same as moving away.

Yes, this is what motherhood is about, moms. We must fight the drift!

• And seagulls. I forgot about seagulls. (Don’t you dare leave those Cheetos in the sand. Do you really want a hole in your skull from a dive-bombing waterfowl?!)

How do you fight the spiritual drift in your life and in the lives of your children?