I was curled up with the book Praying for Strangers when John came home.

"Second time reading it?" he asked. 

"More like the fifth."

The collection of stories by River Jordan about her resolution to pray for a stranger every day for a year hits my sweet spot in a way that never gets old. I'm like the children who sat beside me on the couch all those years, begging me to read the book again. The one they knew by heart. As did I. 

There is the story where River is staying at a bed and breakfast and she hears a baby crying pitifully. When she can stand it no longer she goes poking around and finds an infant, barely a week old, red faced from weeping. She picks her up and soothes her, swaying and cooing. Half an hour later an elderly woman comes in. 

"Oh! She woke up! I hope she didn't bother you."

River gently handed the sleeping baby over. Her mood in that moment was as far away from bothered as it is possible to be. 

"She's my granddaughter's child. I'm too old to raise her and her mother's too young. She'll have to go someplace. It's sad."

River knew that this child was her stranger for the day. A fragile person headed into an unknown future. Surely she was in need of prayer. 

The curious thing about these random interruptions to River's life is how they yank her back from deadlines and agendas, the very stuff of bother, and plunk her into someone else's life. Someone with needs and a name. Jordan almost always asks their name. Later she writes it down. Speaks it in prayer, asking for blessings. 

My own prayer list has two hundred names. Having begun at the dawn of the year I collect more friends than strangers, thought the children at the border will never know I care. Mostly I keep these petitions to myself, not being as brave as River. But I reread them over and over, tamping the prayers down further into the soil of my soul hoping they will take root. 

Believing that they will germinate new life can feel as if I am foolish. But no more so than all the farmers in the land.