This children’s sermon was given not during the Christmas season, but during ordinary time, to accompany a sermon that had to do with waiting for God to do something beautiful. (I wish I could remember the scripture! I gave it a couple of years ago.)

Good morning, girls and boys. Today we’re talking a lot about patience. We’re talking about giving to God and then having the patience to wait so that God can have time to make something wonderful happen. So it’s the perfect time to say to you, Merry Christmas! What, hasn’t anyone wished you that lately?

I thought about Christmas and patience and waiting for God to make something wonderful happen when I reread this book this week. It’s Christmas Farm by Mary Lyn Ray. I’m not going to read the whole thing but I do want to tell you about it. It’s the story of Wilma, who has a sunflower garden but she wants to plant something else. What do you think she decides to grow? Christmas trees! So she orders sixty two dozen trees and asks her 5 year old neighbor Parker to help her.

The trees come and just like Parker, they’re 5 years old. They’re a foot tall. They plant them that summer. “Will they be ready for Christmas?” Parker asks. No. They needed growing time. Winter comes and then spring. They weeded around them. Wilma and Parker kept taking care of them, year after year. The trees grew and so did Parker. Some of the trees were lost- mice chewed their roots, moose cracked their branches, but most of them kept on growing. They grew and grew and grew.

Finally, when Parker turned ten, they knew the trees would be ready that Christmas. December came, and they sold trees and trees and trees. And then they chose their own.

Now read this last page: That night, across their yards, Christmas twinkled. Far away too, in rooms they never saw, in places they never knew, five hundred and sixty six trees that Wilma and Parker had grown wore lights and balls and tinsel in their branches- green balsam branches that smelled the sweet smell of Christmas. Back on the hill, the twenty nine trees that weren’t chosen began winter again. Parker told them they would grow tallest, for people who wanted tall trees next year. One Saturday night, Wilma and Parker filled out an order for eighty tree dozen new seedlings. Then they waited for Spring.

Wilma and Parker knew how to give and then wait for God to do something beautiful. We can learn to do the same.

 Let’s pray together: Dear God, thank you for all the beautiful things you do, when we give and wait, letting you do what you do. We love you God. Amen