Offering 011: Carried
On what we hold… and what holds us.
We were cleaning up the yard after the long freeze.
Dead wood everywhere.
Branches that had looked alive just weeks earlier now felt brittle and gray, snapping easily in our hands. It hadn’t been this cold in 117 years.
We clipped and dragged what needed to go, deciding what to cut back and what might still come back, always leaving the green where we could.
There was something quietly hopeful about that.
The gate was open so I could drag limbs to the curb, requiring the dog to stay on her leash.
At some point I realized my toddler had wandered off with the dog, leash in hand.
I heard her before I saw her.
She was singing.
Not loudly.
Not for anyone else.
Just… to herself.
“Taking care of you… makes me happy too!... I love you.”
A small jingle from ‘Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood’ on PBS; short, simple & the kind that stays.
So there she was, walking the dog with a quiet smile, singing the words as though they belonged entirely to her.
No one had told her to sing it.
No lesson. No reminder.
She had simply carried it, and now she was living it.
It struck me how little it really took.
Not a long explanation.
Not a full dedicated school program. or curriculum
Just a small phrase, repeated enough times,
inside the ordinary flow of a shared life…
until it stayed.
In fact, most of what actually takes root
seems to come in that way.
Through small, repeated touch-points;
simple enough to carry.
The kind that show up later, when you’re just… living.
From the heart,
right when they are needed most.
She had a job to do that day.
She was helping.
She was part of it.
She was smiling as she moved through the work.
Maybe that’s closer to the heart of it than we often think.
Not more content.
Not more complexity.
Just a shared life, lived simply enough that what matters can be picked up,
held for a while…
and carried.
I’ve seen that idea before.
Not in something designed.
Certainly not from a child singing a tune from a kids TV show.
In something small enough to fit in a pocket.
It was a set of Anglican prayer beads someone made and sent out years ago,
made by hands I never knew. Just a name, now an obituary.
A single line that said she made them.
They made their way to me from their little ministry.
I carried them long before I understood them.
My family wasn’t even Episcopalian or Anglican.
But that didn’t stop my mother from passing them on to me.
Placed in my travel bag as a kind of talisman for the road.
To be honest, I still probably don’t use them correctly.
It felt too dense, the liturgy.
It still does.So I didn’t try to master it.
As C.S. Lewis says in Letters to Malcom, we must simply just endure.
I say a prayer on each bead.
Sometimes the Jesus Prayer that I picked up from my first pastor as a child.
Sometimes the Lord’s Prayer,
Sometimes a song
Sometimes just a word.
Remember.
Brought down.
Exalt.
Magnify.
Nothing formal.
Nothing complete.
Whatever comes from the heart.
Just something I could return to, when I needed it most.
And over time, that mattered more than I expected.
Because it was always there.
There are moments when we recognize something as good.
Clear.
True.
But something else usually comes along these days.
Something faster.
Something easier.
Something polished.
And so the simpler thing fades.
Not removed.
Not replaced.
Just… no longer carried.
We tend to think we lose things all at once.
That something has to be taken,
or broken,
or deliberately set aside.
But most of the time,
we don’t lose them that way.
We just stop returning.
And over time,
even what once felt familiar
begins to feel distant.
It didn’t change, we just didn’t return.
In the end,
it isn’t what we’ve covered,
or what we’ve explained,
or even what we’ve fully understood…
It’s what we carry, and what we return to,
when no one is reminding us.
I never met the woman who made my chaplet bead set. I never even attended her church. Our church stood just across the street, and it belonged to a different denomination entirely. Its cornerstone had been set in the late 1800s by a distant relative who shared my last name. He even wrote the book on family genealogy that my father would use decades later to trace our family through the past.
We hadn’t known that until recently, when we went back for my grandmother’s funeral.
Though they are no longer needed for my travel bag,
I know right where to find them.
In fact, I was genuinely surprised last week to realize that one of the beads had been lavender all along.
I hadn’t noticed it in 15 years.
I only noticed it after my daughter fished them out of my pocket and began fidgeting with them while sitting in the pews of our Episcopal church.
Thank you, Kay.
~The Strategic Disciple
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