And the oak tree is not the story.
The story is the car ride in March, when a seven-year-old girl floated a question that sounded like nothing — what if I just lived at your house — and a man who loved her more than his own life laughed and changed the subject because she’d made it easy for him to.
Kids don’t lead with the real thing. They almost never do. They put out a small, safe, deniable version first, and they watch what you do with it.
If you take the small version seriously, you get the real one. If you laugh at the small version — even warmly, even lovingly, even because you think you’re reassuring them — they put the real one away and carry it by themselves, and they may carry it for six more months, or six more years, or forever.
So here is what I say now, and I’ve said it at two churches and once at a county foster-parent training, which I never expected to be doing at sixty-eight years old:
