Small talk led to deep talk, and I listened to a woman, decades my elder, share some events that may have broken me, had God put me in her shoes. Destruction of family land, loss of a child, and an unhappy marriage crumbling after forty years together.

I wondered what my grandfather would have said, as I reached for the radio dial, if he had known how his words would spread like wildflowers on a fertile field. So many hearts hungry for someone to care, to believe, to share faith in them, to know that they too mattered. If he hadn’t said those words, every time we said hello and good bye, if they hadn’t imprinted so deep in heart and memory, what would have filled their absence?