And You'll Grow, Grow, Grow.

When I was a kid, we would sing this song in Sunday School and grow like little sprouts from the ground.  Our arms would stretch wide and our fingers would stretch like limbs off branches, as large as we could go.  Then the verses would switch and we would end bundled and balled, wilted and scrunched into plops mashed into the floor.

Read your Bible, pray every day, pray every day, pray every day 

Read your Bible, pray every day and you’ll grow, grow, grow 

And you’ll grow, grow, grow and you’ll grow, grow, grow

Read your Bible, pray every day, and you’ll grow, grow, grow

Neglect your Bible, forget to pray, forget to pray, forget to pray 

Neglect your Bible, forget to pray and you’ll shrink, shrink, shrink 

And you’ll shrink, shrink, shrink and you’ll shrink, shrink, shrink

Neglect your Bible, forget to pray and you’ll shrink, shrink, shrink

These lyrics fumbled through my mind riding in a white tour van across the Costa Rican highway, I heard the words in my heart in a fresh way.  A convicting way.  I sang them with Mark, bumbling across bridges and through rainforest, and near alligators, and wheeled them through my mind for miles since.

Praying, reading, growing.
Neglecting, forgetting, shrinking.

I am [almost] always a woman who is praying, reading, growing.  I live in these words, I harvest in this garden.

But I know my recent days have been full of neglect, full of forget.  And I know it more in my heart than in my head.  My head knows it, a poignant fact.  My heart knows it, a worried soul.

Shrink, Shrink, Shrink.

I now know shrink.  I now know neglect, forget.

The old children's ditty has spoken to my heart.  The lyrics set to simple tune, strumming strings in my soul.  I wish I could go back and tell the writer the words sting me at thirty.  I wish I could go back and tell my 28 year old self to keep trucking, keep reading, keep growing.  But life swallowed me up this year, like Jonah in the whale, and now I find myself spit-out and sand-sitting, and wondering how I turned into neglect and forget.

Yet the woman on the sand, the flower in the soil, knows the way to grow again:  Read, and Pray.

I sing the little children's sonet in my head and grab the Gospel words from my memory, my Biblegateway, and my NIV, and I begin to read.

I lay in my bed under covers and mull over the days conversations, and I begin to pray.

And I begin to grow.

~~~
*If you haven't heard this little children's ditty, you can see/listen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfScu505a2o

** I praise the Lord, too, though for these days where I haven't read and prayed, because it has allowed me to grow in purposed faith, without [at least, with less] worry and pushed me to simply move forward with greatly abundant trust.