farts, earthquakes and prayer

I was at the kitchen sink making an attempt to bring some order to the chaos, while a pot of rice, beans, and leftover chicken simmered for dinner.  My nearly 3 year old daughter was at the counter measuring teaspoons of sea salt and brown rice into a dry measuring cup (one dump through the sieve will sort it out fine).  She began to sing to herself the first line of a song my son brought home from camp last summer, “Oops I farted, an earthquake started….”

A few moments of silence, scooping, sorting, washing, rinsing, then, “Mommy, I was singing that song cause there was that big earthquake in Japan.”  The song continues, though she had not sung “and that’s how the dinosaurs died out.”  Had she begun to connect dots and wonder if somehow a natural act of her own body had caused people in Japan to suffer? I assured her that that song was pure fiction and that the disaster in Japan was not a result of her or anybody passing gas.  She honestly seemed relieved to hear this assurance from me.
  

Soon she was on the dining room potty releasing the cause of the fart.  I took a few moments to look at the computer.  “Mommy, God really loves those people in Japan……he really cares about them….and God really loves us too. We should pray for the people in Japan.”  So I drew near to her and I prayed for people in Japan to have homes, to have enough food, to have comfort, to trust that God and his love are real.  “Mommy, God is so so good! Lets sing that song about that. ” So we sang “God is so Good” in English and in Japanese.  She asked me sing it in Spanish too so we sang a verse in Spanish.

I don’t believe that farts cause earthquakes but I do believe that the heartfelt prayers of a child can cause blessing to people all the way over in Japan.  They can even cause a harried mother to stop flitting from one incomplete task to the next and to pause long enough to remember and trust that God is indeed good.