One Verse
Sep 5, 2026 · 18 min · 8 segments
Sister Johnson puts a bare paper tree on the classroom wall, and every verse a child learns by heart earns a leaf. Ana is fast — gloriously, effortlessly fast — and by the third week she has…
Sep 5, 2026 · 18 min · 8 segments
Sister Johnson puts a bare paper tree on the classroom wall, and every verse a child learns by heart earns a leaf. Ana is fast — gloriously, effortlessly fast — and by the third week she has…
The first week of October, Sister Johnson put a paper tree up on the classroom wall and had no leaves on it at all.
Every verse you learn by heart, she said.
and say back to me without help, gets you a leaf with your name on it.
By Thanksgiving, I would like this tree to be so full you can't see the branches.
Anna was out of her chair before Sister Johnson finished the sentence.
Anna was made out of motion.
She talked through supper and through car rides and through most of her bath, and the words came to her the way water comes downhill, without any effort at all.
A verse would go into Anna once and stay there.
She could not have explained how.
It simply worked that way, the same as her legs worked, and she had never once had to be grateful for it.
Her sister took longer.
Ava Grace was six.
She brought the list home and sat down with it on the kitchen floor and read all the way down it with one finger twice.
taking her time about it the way she takes her time about everything.
Then she picked up the fourth verse of 1 Corinthians 13, four lines long, easily the longest one on the paper, with two words in it she had never heard in her life, and she carried it over to mom.
What does suffereth mean?
sat down on the dish towel and thought about how to say it to a six-year-old, which is harder than saying it to anybody else.
It means bearing something a long time, she said, bearing it without getting mean about it.
Ava Grace looked at the paper a while longer.
Okay, then that's the one, she said.
Baby, there are short ones on that list.
I know,
said Ava Grace, and took it to her room.
The first week of October, Sister Johnson put a paper tree up on the classroom wall and had no leaves on it at all.
Every verse you learn by heart, she said.
and say back to me without help, gets you a leaf with your name on it.
By Thanksgiving, I would like this tree to be so full you can't see the branches.
Anna was out of her chair before Sister Johnson finished the sentence.
Anna was made out of motion.
She talked through supper and through car rides and through most of her bath, and the words came to her the way water comes downhill, without any effort at all.
A verse would go into Anna once and stay there.
She could not have explained how.
It simply worked that way, the same as her legs worked, and she had never once had to be grateful for it.
Her sister took longer.
Ava Grace was six.
She brought the list home and sat down with it on the kitchen floor and read all the way down it with one finger twice.
taking her time about it the way she takes her time about everything.
Then she picked up the fourth verse of 1 Corinthians 13, four lines long, easily the longest one on the paper, with two words in it she had never heard in her life, and she carried it over to mom.
What does suffereth mean?
sat down on the dish towel and thought about how to say it to a six-year-old, which is harder than saying it to anybody else.
It means bearing something a long time, she said, bearing it without getting mean about it.
Ava Grace looked at the paper a while longer.
Okay, then that's the one, she said.
Baby, there are short ones on that list.
I know,
said Ava Grace, and took it to her room.
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