The folder

"Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs." — Matthew 19:14

There is a folder in the filing cabinet at the church office that I will pull out in a week or two.

It is the curriculum folder, the one I go through every year before the children come back. I have done this for nearly fifty years now, which is a number that sounds impossible when I say it aloud. Forty-nine Septembers. Forty-nine first Sundays. Forty-nine mornings of walking into that room and seeing who walks through the door.

I am not thinking about the curriculum today. I am thinking about the children.

The ones who were in the class last year will be a year older when they come back. A year is nothing to me. A year is everything to a child. The girl who could not sit still in April will come back in September taller and perhaps quieter, or perhaps not, and either way she will be different and I will have to learn her again. The boy who asked the hard question about heaven last March will come back with a new hard question, or possibly the same one, because children do not let go of the things that bother them just because an adult gave them an answer.

And there will be new ones. There are always new ones. Someone moves to town. Someone's parents decide it is time. Someone's grandmother brings them, the way grandmothers do. I will not know their names on the first Sunday and I will know them by the third and by October I will know which one needs to sit by the window and which one needs to sit by me and which one needs to sit on the floor because sitting on the floor is the only thing that works.

This is what I have learned in forty-nine years of Septembers: you cannot plan for a child. You can plan a lesson. You can plan the crayons and the felt board and the story and the prayer. But you cannot plan for the child who raises her hand in the middle of the parable and says something that stops the room. You cannot plan for the child who will not speak for three weeks and then on the fourth week says the truest thing anyone has said all morning.

The folder is in the filing cabinet. The room is waiting. The children are out there somewhere, being children, which is the best thing they can be doing with the rest of their summer. I will be ready when they come back. I am always ready. The getting-ready is part of the love.

Lord, send them back when it is time.