When my oldest son was in kindergarten, I found myself chatting with another parent whose daughter was about the same age. We were watching the kids run around the backyard when he told me something that has stayed with me for years. He said that his young daughter had rarely received a compliment that wasn’t about her appearance:  “She’s cute, she’s pretty, someone likes her dress.” 

The things that were never said — never asked — mattered just as much.

As I raised three boys, I noticed they received comments about their abilities, their intelligence, their bravery, or their willingness to try something new. Only occasionally did someone remark on their appearance — perhaps my middle son’s blonde curls, or, as they grew, their height. But for this little girl, the same age as my son, the message was already arriving, delivered cheerfully by well-meaning adults: what matters most about you is what you look like.

I haven’t been given the chance to raise girls, but I think hard about raising my three sons — about the patterns of talk they hear, experience, and mimic. About what they notice. What is said to them, and what isn’t. 

In this spring season of graduations and new beginnings, no shortage of attempted wisdom is shared with young people. Questions are asked. Plans are made. And beneath all of it, expectations are communicated. Sometimes in what is said, and just as often in what is not.

I think back on quiet expectations handed to me as a young person, as well as the people — mostly women — who shaped my early faith: the Sunday School teacher who encouraged me to study more deeply, the Calvinette (the Christian Reformed Church’s answer to Girl Scouts) leader who allowed me to question. That same leader may have gently scolded me when, in pursuit of a time management badge, I submitted a log of my week that included watching a Miss America pageant — something she asked me to promise I’d never, ever do again. I was drawn to her passion, her nudging to question, her refusal to let small things pass without examination. I felt seen by her persistence regarding who and what deserved my attention.

I think about my first experiences as a young woman stepping into church leadership. My first invitation to join a church committee, just out of college, began with a joke — the kind meant to land lightly and disappear quickly — that maybe I, the young woman in the room, could bring the cookies next time. There was also the assumption that I’d be the one to take the notes.

Church spaces, especially, are full of small talk. Those flitting comments made before and after services. It’s often in narthexes and the backs of sanctuaries, during coffee hour or community meals, that our children have their first real conversations with adults outside their families.

For a child, these moments are something like a rehearsal. They are learning how to answer questions from adults, how to hold eye contact, how to endure that long stretch of time when the grown-ups stand around talking, and they must stand around, eavesdropping or enduring.  What do they hear? And when the conversation finally turns to them, what questions are they asked? What kind of compliments will they accept? What will they be taught about their place in the world?

Our sense of ourselves — our sense of who God made us to be, and where we belong — is built not through singular events but through the accumulation of small moments. The women who shaped my faith and my understanding of where I belong within it did so not through grand gestures, but through years of small ones.

The children in our congregations are paying attention to more than we realize. They are learning, from us, what is worth saying — and by extension, what is worth being.

How are we showing them what matters to us? What matters to God?

I know no better way to honor the power of words than with a poem from my dear mentor and teacher, Jack Ridl. Jack introduces his “Love Poem” on his website with these words: “What can seem inconsequential can actually be what very often keeps us connected, seamless in our humanity. This love poem, I hope, reaches beyond the singular situation and suggests that whatever creates a common care is anything but trivial.”

I am grateful for all the ways Jack teaches us that our words are never small. 

 Love Poem
“[He] makes the smallest talk I’ve ever heard.”
                                    –John Woods

The smaller the talk the better.
I want to sit with you and have us
Solemnly delight in dust; and one violet;
And our fourth night out;
And buttonholes.  I want us
To spend hours counting dog hairs,
And looking up who hit .240
in each of the last ten years.
I want to talk about the weather;
And detergents; and carburetors;
And debate which pie our mothers made
The best.  I want us to shrivel
Into nuthatches, realize the metaphysics
Of crossword puzzles, wait for the next
Sports season, and turn into sleep
Holding each other’s favorite flower,
Day, color, record, playing card.
When we wake, I want us to begin again
Never saying anything more lovely than garage door.

Graduation photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash