It is a short engagement and a small wedding, and there is a great deal to do. Allison has the binder open to somebody else's day, and this time she asks before she decides. Andy has been without a red ball since the afternoon he carried his across the street, and will not take a new one. The night before, Ava Grace asks the question nobody else thought to ask — what happens if Brother Thompson forgets? On a Saturday in September, in front of a room holding every face that waited a year alongside him, a slow man says his piece in his own plain voice, and a two-year-old finds out where his ball has been the whole time. And when the last of it is cleared away, two chairs sit out on a porch that only ever had one. The Season Two finale.

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 4:9-10; Mark 10:9 (KJV).

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After a year of being told to wait, Brother Thompson asks Dad and Pastor Garrett one more time — and this time the answer is yes. Allison Jones, eleven years old and the finest organizer in the congregation, hears the news and does what Allison does: she gets a binder. Tabs. A timeline. A rain plan. It is genuinely beautiful work, and Brother Thompson, who is newer in the Lord and gentle to a fault, says yes to every bit of it. Then Allison walks past his porch with a printed schedule and hears him practicing what he actually wants to say — plain, stumbling, out loud, to his dog — and understands that there is nowhere in her beautiful plan for him to simply talk. What it costs her to close that binder is the whole story.

Scripture: Proverbs 16:9; Ecclesiastes 3:1 (KJV).

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Sister Johnson puts a bare paper tree on the classroom wall, and every verse a child learns by heart earns a leaf. Ana is fast — gloriously, effortlessly fast — and by the third week she has twenty-six leaves and a number she cannot stop saying out loud. Ava Grace picks one verse. A long one, with a word in it she does not understand, and she works on it for three weeks without earning a single leaf. Then Ana finishes her little sister's verse for her in front of the whole class, and is entirely correct, and something breaks anyway. When Ana's own turn comes and the words go clean out of her head, it is the sister she embarrassed who crosses the room. A story about the difference between knowing a thing and spending it. Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:4; 1 Corinthians 8:1; Proverbs 27:2 (KJV).

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