Amidst all the chaos seemingly running rampant in our world, it’s always helpful to be reminded of the sheer kindness carried out by those who may never receive any direct benefit from their most unselfish acts.
When our twins were born, we received this red folder seemingly packed to a breaking point with all these documents we supposedly responsible parents needed to fill out as if their very lives depended on it. But one was rather different from the legalistic rest. It was for this thing called Imagination Library. We had never heard of it, so we researched the website:
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is dedicated to inspiring a love of reading by gifting books free of charge to children from birth to age five, through funding shared by Dolly Parton and local community partners in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Republic of Ireland. Inspired by her father’s inability to read and write, Dolly started her Imagination Library in 1995 for the children within her home county. Today, her program spans five countries and gifts millions of free books each month to children around the world.
I will be the first to admit I’m not the biggest country music fan, to which Dolly is considered royalty and all, but let’s just say I’ve become a fan of hers in the last few years, and all those whose names more locally I will never know, who contribute to this…well, ministry of sorts, without any direct benefit to them whatsoever.
Thankfully, our children’s collective excitement level bursts to shrieks and screams over books and heading to the local library, knowing full well that technology will more take over their day-to-day beings soon enough. But also, over and over again, these free books miraculously appear in our mailbox. Granted, some are better than others, but this last one was a gold mine for all ages in the household to read.
The New York Times Bestseller The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld (published by Penguin Random House in 2018), tells this story about a boy, who with an excitement level to rival that of our children, built this massive display of wooden blocks. Unfortunately, it was all knocked down by a bunch of birds, leading to a sadness that melts the hearts of us supposedly mature adults, who have witnessed first-hand the relentless dedication of children in crafting whatever they wish to take over their lives for seemingly hours on end.
Then, all these animals come by who try to immediately help the boy, almost attempting their own well-intentioned quick-fix for the child to “accept it and move on” (seemingly Bible Job-esque). One encouraged him to talk about it, another to scream about it to hopefully unleash the anger, another tried to help him remember where all the blocks were before, another to hide and pretend nothing happened, another to knock down someone else’s, among other responses. And then came the rabbit, who just snuggled up against him in silence. And the boy said, “Please stay with me.”
Those four words are a goldmine for family dynamics, to be sure, but also with ministry. As much as we would prefer the quick-fix to medical issues, economic realities, as well as those “family dynamics,” and whatever else gets thrown our way, we obviously recognize such instantaneous solutions (not to mention the people out there to automatically improve the circumstances) do not come often, to say the least. But no matter how much we realize that, we still deep-down yearn for everything to go back to (better) normal, whatever that is for each person. And yet, through all that frustration, we need someone or some-ones to respond to our sometimes unspoken plea, “Please stay with me.”
As the story so goes, the rabbit then helps the boy go through all what the earlier animals attempted to do to help him all along; perhaps to see if any of those worked, in the end. And then, the rabbit just needed to listen to the boy’s plan to rebuild it to even more personal amazement. Granted, its written for children to be sure, and not all matters of life can be rebuilt so easily, but sometimes the utter simplicity of “Please stay with me,” has its own Emmanuel power: Christ with us through it all, no matter what. Thanks be to God, indeed!
In Christ,
Pastor Brad