The future is bright

A couple of months ago, we began seeing children coming to our gatherings on a more regular basis. One 5^th grade girl had some paper and colored pencils with her and she was drawing as we were discussing John 15 and talking about fruitfulness. Someone mentioned that people can count the number of seeds inside one apple, but that only God knows the number of apples inside one seed. The little girl looked up from her drawing and asked, “Could you say that again please?” The man repeated his observation, and the girl got engaged in drawing a new picture. At end of gathering I asked if she’d share what she’d been working on. She pulled out her picture and explained the frames: a seed being planted, the sun is shining and the sprout coming up, then storms that are hard but bring needed water, then a final slide of the mature tree bearing fruit with apples falling to the ground so they can bear more trees. The girl had taken that spiritual concept and had spent the rest of the time fleshing out in her mind what that looked like. Although it may have looked like she wasn’t paying attention, she was engaged in the process of setting aside time for God.