1 Mother 2 Another

We started our Matthew 25/Good Deeds jars
over the weekend: every day in December the girls draw a slip of
paper from their own jar, and they do whatever that piece of paper
instructs for the day. It’ll be something like “write a
thank-you note to your teacher” or “tell a friend what
you like about her” – simple stuff, but all things that
encourage you to love on someone else. At the end of the day each
girl will put her piece of paper in a box wrapped like a Christmas
present with an opening at the top, and at the end of December we
put the box under our tree as our gift to Jesus – all the
ways we’ve loved him by loving others this month. The girls
look forward to it every year and I confess I enjoy it too.


So on Sunday Cora drew “pray for a stranger” and her
brow wrinkled up. “Mommy, how can I pray for someone if I
don’t even know them? How do I know what to say?”

“Well,” I said, “Think
about the people we already pray for that we don’t know
– a relative of a friend, who might be sick; or people in New
York after hurricane Sandy hit. That sort of thing.” I
started brainstorming.


“You could pray for the children in Africa who don’t
have enough to eat, or you could pray for the kids at our homeless
shelter who don’t have a place to sleep at night. Or-“


Cora cut me off, holding up one hand confidently. “Ok, I got
this.” And she walked into the living room, lay down on her
back on the couch, and gazed at the ceiling, hands behind her head.
Though she was silent, Cora’s hands started moving like she
was having a conversation, a rather disconcerting effect to an
obsever.


A few moments later she got off the couch. “Done!” she
said cheerily. “We talk best on the couch, you know.
That’s how me and God work it out.” And she dropped her
paper in the gift box and walked off.


I love that she’s not embarrassed to pray in front of people,
and that she’s completely unselfconscious about how and where
she does it. I found myself eyeing the couch speculatively the rest
of the day . . . maybe she’s got a personal line plugged in
there?