What they carry

"The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them." — Isaiah 11:6

The children have been on summer break for two months now and I have been thinking about what they take with them and what they leave behind.

You plant things in children the way you plant things in a garden and then summer comes and they are gone and you do not stand over the empty chairs asking whether anything took root. That is not the work. The work is the planting. The summer is for the growing, and the growing happens out of sight, which is the part that requires trust, and I have been doing this for forty-nine years and the trust has not gotten easier. It has gotten more practiced, which is not the same thing.

There was a girl in the class this year who asked me if God listened to everybody or just the people who knew how to pray right. I told her that God listened to everybody including the people who did not know they were praying, which is most of us most of the time. She thought about that for a while and then she said that was a lot of listening and I said yes it was. She did not seem troubled by it. Children are better at bigness than adults are. They do not need to shrink God down to a manageable size. They just let God be big and go on about their day.

I hope she remembers that conversation this summer, but if she does not, the conversation still happened and I still had it and she still said what she said and the saying of it was enough. That is what I have learned about planting. You put the seed in the ground and you walk away and you do not dig it up to see if it has sprouted. You trust the ground. You trust the summer. You trust the thing you cannot see.

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