The room is ready

"Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs." — Mark 10:14

I went into the room this afternoon and got it ready, and it took an hour, and I could have done it in fifteen minutes.

The class starts next Sunday. It has been out since the end of May, and the room has been sitting the way we left it, which is to say the eight chairs are still pulled into the circle they were in on the last morning and nobody has moved them since, because nobody uses the fellowship hall in the summer except the quilting group and they push everything to the wall and put it back wrong and I have given up saying anything about it.

I straightened the circle. That was the first thing. There is a right size to it. Eight chairs make a circle a child can see across. Nine is crowded and ten means somebody is on the floor, and a child on the floor is a child who has been told something about where she sits. So: eight, evenly spaced, none of them touching.

I got down on my knees and went over the carpet. Beige, and it has been beige for forty years, and forty years of small shoes have walked it into the particular shade beige goes when it has been that thoroughly used. There were crayon pieces down in it. There are always crayon pieces down in it. I got them out with my fingers because a vacuum will not lift a crayon nub out of a carpet like that and I have tried.

I took the coffee can down and went through the crayons. This is the part that took the time. Half of them are stubs. Every year I tell myself I will throw out the stubs and every year I do not, because a stub is a crayon that got used, and there is a boy or a girl attached to every one of them somewhere in the last forty years, and I am not going to be the one to throw that away. So I sorted them and put the stubs at the bottom and the whole ones on top where a small hand will find them first, and I put the can back on the table, not quite in the same place, the way it is never quite in the same place.

The felt board was behind the door. The fish are in the envelope with the loaves and I checked, and they are all there, and the felt has gone thin at the edges where it has been handled.

Then I sat down in one of the eight chairs, which I do not do when the children are here, and looked at the room from their height.

It is a small room. I had forgotten that. From a chair it is a small room with a window on one side and a beige carpet and a coffee can on a table, and this is the whole of what a child sees, and out of this the child is supposed to get some idea of God.

Forty-nine years I have been doing this and it has never once seemed like enough equipment.

Jesus said let the little children come. He did not say prepare a place worthy of them, which is good, because I could not. He said do not stop them. The whole instruction is to get out of the way.

I turned off the light and shut the door. Next Sunday there will be children in it.

Lord, the room is ready as I can make it. Bring them.