The Best We Can Do

October 29, 2024

Beloved:
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          Bless you, Birdy!
          The dog sneezes so much this time of year I hardly hear it, not until the three-year-old blesses her so kindly.  We were sitting on the porch eating popsicles yesterday, going over the day.  She asked about my Halloween costume, suggesting I be a bat when I told her I wasn’t planning to dress up.  She’s going as a spooky skeleton, spooky being her very favorite word these days.  Spooky refers to cute bats and ghosts and witches, spiders, pumpkins and skeleton pajamas with glow-in-the-dark bones screen-printed on black fabric.  Her life and her little brother’s is so safe and calm and gentle, a glorious bubble of childhood every little kid deserves and too few ever know.  For no virtue on her part or her parents’ so much as the luck of being born when and where they were.
          The odds are entirely in their favor and yet, the very thought of something happening to them takes my breath away.  Takes my breath away in a way that was not true when my own kids were little.  Maybe I felt more in control then, or maybe I know better now just how awful some humans are toward other people’s children.  The grandmothers of Gaza, Lebanon and Sudan.  Grandmothers whose children and grandchildren are walking that terrible walk to the U.S. border, hoping against hope to be received.  Grandmothers who are raising their grandkids with too little strength, in too small a space, on too tight a budget – because for whatever reason their kids are just not able to parent.
          I wish E. and R. could be little for longer, that this idyllic time of innocence could last and last.  But I suppose those are the wishes of the privileged, that such innocence is itself a form of privilege.  Hungry kids are not innocent.  Kids whose families are hiding or on the run are not innocent of the meanness of this world.  The best that we can do is do right by every kid we can, to love the ones we’re with and work for justice on behalf of all of them insofar as we are able.
          I’m headed outside for a walk in this delightfully breezy autumn.  I pray the day is kind to you, and you have the chance to bless another creature.

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette 

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