Prayers

 “You pray for the hungry, and then you feed them. This is how prayer works.” - Pope Francis

He was an old man.

Old enough to give out before he got to the end of a long row of tomatoes.

He was too old to fill his bag as fast as his boss expected.

When he sat under the old, rickety rocking chair under the ancient magnolia tree at dusk, and kicked off his raggedy flip-flops with one foot and then the other, you could see his life in his feet.

All ten of his toes were gnarled like the knots on the branches of the magnolia tree.

His soles were as calloused as stones in a freshly plowed ground.

The feet themselves were thick with mud and looked as if they were just created by God’s hands from the dust of the earth.

His heart was like his feet.

It continued to beat steadily and strongly as it always had, not quite as steadily and strongly as when he was a young man, but steady and strong still filled with faith, love and hope.

His heart was gnarled from years and years of work as a migrant worker, from meeting people from town to town who valued the fruits and vegetables over and above the old man himself.

He was not bitter, though.

Each night he prayed a prayer of thanks as he drifted off to sleep.

“God,” he would whisper humbly, “”May the fruits and vegetables I picked today keep a child or an old woman or a poor family from going to bed hungry.”

And as his eyes tenderly closed, his stomach grumbled and he wondered, ever so slightly, if someone was praying for him.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Prayers, 2024