This year at the elementary school where we work in Grenoble, a teacher had the idea to propose a weekly moment of prayer for the children and asked us to help. I was the only one of us sisters available on Tuesdays, and so I began to lend a hand.

Once a week, during the two-hour lunch break, the children who signed up for the école de prière, the school of prayer, gather in the schoolyard and head into the school’s chapel with the teacher, Myriam, and myself. We stay there for fifteen minutes before returning to play. Every week, I’m surprised that there is a group of children that take time from the games during recess to come and pray with us. Even more, they bring with them the friends with whom they had been playing. Every week, the same scene repeats itself: “Teacher, can he come with us, too, even though he’s not signed up?” The children are more missionary than we are!

And every week, in the little group of children that gather around us, there is always someone who doesn’t know anything about God or of the Christian faith. It’s a beautiful moment that always makes me realize how attractive God is for the human heart, how He is in constant dialogue with the heart of each person, above all, with those of children. But I also realize that God needs us to tell the children the story He has already weaved with man, how he decided to enter into the world and stay here…

Each time, in those brief fifteen minutes, I pray that through our proposals to the children – singing a song, reciting a Hail Mary, listening to a presentation, or looking silently at Jesus – God can touch their hearts and begin to stitch together a relationship with each of them.

In the image, a view of Grenoble, France.