From the Sunday school class

"Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening." — 1 Samuel 3:10

The children were already thinking about summer before I got the lesson started this morning. This is the last Sunday before the break, and they knew it, and their bodies knew it before their minds did. They were fidgeting in a way that was not the usual fidgeting. It was the fidgeting of children who can feel the calendar turning, who know that next Sunday they will be somewhere else, doing something that does not involve sitting in a circle on plastic chairs in the fellowship hall listening to Miss Ruby.

I had planned to teach the story of Samuel in the temple, the part where the boy hears his name called in the night and thinks it is the old priest Eli, and goes to Eli three times before Eli tells him it is the Lord. It is a good story for the end of the year because it is a story about listening, and I wanted them to carry it into the summer, the idea that God might be the one calling and they might not know it at first.

Olivia listened. She listens the way her father listens, which is with her whole body pointed at you and her eyes not moving. The other children were making the paper boats I had given them to decorate, which was my concession to the fact that nobody was going to sit still for thirty minutes on the last day before summer. Olivia made her boat and listened at the same time.

I told them the thing I tell them every year at the end, which is that I am going to miss them, and that I will see them in September, and that they should listen for their names this summer. They nodded the way children nod when an adult is saying something they think is sweet. Olivia folded her boat one more time and put it in her pocket.

The parking lot was bright when I came out. The maples are at full leaf. Summer is here whether the calendar says so or not.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.