When she stands in the garden, hauls the pumpkin up in both arms, she laughs and says it’s like she’s the one grown all round and full.
“Haven’t I grown so big?” She’s a riot. Summer and light and this reaping, it makes us tipsy happy.
She giggles and the pumpkin rounding out her belly, it jiggles, and I grin.
A mother’s smile is the child’s sun — what can grow without the warmth of grace?
Heaving up over the the vines and the tendrils and the weeds, she keeps saying it aloud, ” One step. One Step. Getting there. One Step more.
”
And there she is in an October light deepening, her growing right to
the edge of the garden, moving steady, one step at a time. And when she
looks up and tells me she really is getting there, there it really is
—
Family is a field to grow in. Where children grow up and parents grow patient.
Where
mothers grow in maturity and fathers grow in forgiveness, where sons
grow in self-control and daughters in discernment and this is what He
means — For us to stretch and dig down and reach out and for family to
grow us full in the faith.
Aren’t we all growing here
together and how can she be six already? Why is it lately that when she
turns, that I can see it again, that long ago baby face, the way her
eyes would look right up?
These steps with the small, these are
the giant leaps not to be lost. Saving the world, it begins with the salvation of one child.
There’s only a harvest in the kingdom when someone attends to the the smallness of a seed.
I watch her.
How she rounds with the reaping, how she gets her pumpkin to the walk.
“And now let’s just roll it. Straight to the stairs.”
She throws herself all into it, pushes that pumpkin.
And her feet slap the walk, this crazy applause — her just rolling with it.
Her with eyes on the stairs…
All these steps but ladders leading straight up…
“…but God made you grow.
It’s not the one who plants or the one who waters who is at the center of this process but God
,
who makes things grow.
You happen to be God’s field in which we are working.
About Ann Voskamp