Your children are your Psalms

Don’t have time for hours of quiet and stillness with God? Don’t feel bad, says Joshua Luke Smith. It isn’t the size of our offering that matters to God, but the heart behind it 

Sometime last spring, we sat out on the deck for lunch with our friend Father Columba. He’s a Franciscan friar of the Renewal. We shared chicken Caesar salad and frozen pizzas. It was hot for an April afternoon; the sun hurled her heat at us without apology and we squinted as we spoke.

Father Columba is joy incarnate. It’s hard not to smile when you’re with him - not because he’s cracking jokes, but because while being one of the wisest people I know, he carries the expectancy and glee of a child. It’s what many have called a “second naïveté” - a faith, as Dostoevsky put it, that has been through the fire and has come out the other side dancing.

I asked him what a typical day looks like for a Franciscan friar, and he described it with a wry, irreverent smile: rising early to pray the Psalms, sharing breakfast with the brothers, setting aside time for personal devotion, then working in the community, serving the least. Kara and I kept asking questions, impressed and inspired by such a devoted life. All the while, our kids ran around us, pulling us from the conversation every few minutes to rescue our son after he flew into a wall on his bike, to affirm our daughter for something she’d done.