John and I spend several hours a week on zoom. Probably many of you do as well. The groups that we lead begin with a check in, followed by a chance to express your appreciation for the person sitting next to you. Sometimes people arrive... not that they drove anywhere... in a frumpy mood. Many of us find our collective spirits to be dimmed by the uncertainty around us. To gather or not for the holidays? To hug or keep your arms at your sides?

 

The stories of marital kindness are like mathematical wonders. They originate as a gesture to make the speaker happy, such as an especially delicious dinner, but in being brought to visibility, or technically audibility, it brings joy to the doer to be publicly thanked. Then as if that is not enough, which it is, it goes on to bless everyone in the zoom. Two of our groups include couples on different continents which only amplifies the evidence of power. 

 

Then I toss out a question. I do not preplan this, but rather open the paper door that hangs like an advent calendar in my mind, the one that God places sweet surprises behind. 

 

"Who is someone in your life who was generous?"

 

"How have you changed?"

 

"When were you wrong?"

 

"Who believed in you?"

 

There is a pause. Even though the answers are buried deep in each person's memory, it takes a bit of digging. Other concerns have piled on, like three meals worth of dishes on an otherwise beautiful marble counter. 

 

Then the unmute buttons click. 

 

Confidentiality precludes me from sharing anyone else's stories, but I can tell my own. My young children believed in me. This was not necessarily based on my resume, or past successes. But when we drove across the country in a car old enough to vote, they believed I would keep them safe. When we went to the grocery store and piled bananas and cereal in the cart they believed I had enough money to pay for it. Which sometimes I didn't quite. When an earthquake rocked the ground we walked on they pulled their quilts and pillows into our bedroom to sleep on the floor. Because they believed they were safer there. Which is not technically true.

 

My four year olds believed that I would take care of them. I certainly surprised myself by doing just that, even when there were two of them at once and I was the ripe old age of  forty nine. But the truly astonishing thing is that God believed in me.