I see it in her face. Or rather, it’s what I don’t see in her face. She is in kindergarten, and I am at the neighborhood school where I help out, and we are walking the halls to a room where we will work on writing sentences.

It is the first thing I notice about her: there is no smile on her face. Not a trace. Not in her eyes, not in her cheeks. She wears one of the most serious, light-less expressions I’ve seen on such a small person.

I sit down at a table with the two students I’ve brought and hand them a reader about the fair. I explain that we are going to write our own sentences about it after we read it together. She reads when I ask and listens when it’s time for that too, and when we finish reading she pulls out her page and brushes her long dark hair out of her face. Sits and stares.

“What’s your favorite thing at the fair? What would you like to write about?” I ask. She sits quietly, thinks.

“I see my dad,” she says, and starts to pencil it out on blank white paper. I turn to help the other student with his next word, when she says plainly, “My dad is in jail. He went to jail this Christmas.” My heart sinks down at her words, as it always does when conversations turn this way. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” I answer, meaning every word deeply and feeling all their inadequacy at the same time. “He stole a cadillac.” She looks right at me, waits for my response.

The other student is waiting as well. One waits for some kind of hope to a fatherless nightmare and one waits for help spelling “nachos.” And I am in the middle of them. I look at her sad little eyes and tell her that I know it is very hard on her for her daddy to be in jail, and she looks right back into mine and says, “Every night I cry for him.”

What do you say to a little girl who tells you that? And why should she tell me? She doesn’t even know me. I had asked her to write about her favorite thing at the fair. And yet her honest little heart, in a way that takes my breath away, holds out the most painful thing in her world and lets me hold a small piece of it with her. And in all its brokenness and pain, it takes the form of a gift right now.

It is gift to me. Gift to walk these halls. Gift to help them learn. Gift to see their smiles and give my own. And gift to be invited into their sorrow and to be one who gets to offer kindness. Gift upon gift. Grace upon grace.

And in its own small way, it is gift to her. It’s not all the gift I want to give her- the one that fixes all her problems and gets her daddy out of jail and out of trouble and changes his heart that changes his life and heals her family… those are not gifts in my power to give her on a January Thursday morning. But I blink back tears and thank her for sharing with me. I tell her I will be praying for her and for her daddy, because Jesus loves them both very much. And for a few minutes on an ordinary school day she gets to unexpectedly share her burden with someone who cares.

It seems like the painfully smallest of gifts to give, really just a tiny seed of truth and love scattered on soil that is so young and yet so scorched already. But the Farmer who scatters them is utterly good, I remind myself. And He knows how to grow the most amazing things from the tiniest most unlikely beginnings. Like a kingdom even.

And times like these grow me, train me to look again and again to the One “who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” … who knows how to make light from darkness, life from death and smiles on the face- even smiles in the heart- of a little kindergarten girl who misses her dad.

“I am the LORD, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me” – Jeremiah 32:27