the girl child came early to church<\/p>\n
to help prepare the sanctuary<\/p>\n
place the candles<\/p>\n
put the ribbons into the book in the right places<\/p>\n
place flowers in vases for the altar<\/p>\n
she vacuumed and swept<\/p>\n
even used Windex and newspaper on the stained glass windows that were low enough for her to reach<\/p>\n
she pulled the empty silver insert out of the baptismal font<\/p>\n
filled it with water<\/p>\n
and brought it to the priest for a blessing<\/p>\n
for that is how holy water gets its holiness,<\/p>\n
but<\/p>\n
the priest bent down<\/p>\n
took the silver bowl of water from the girl child<\/p>\n
and asked her to bless the water,<\/p>\n
and the priest;<\/p>\n
the girl child placed both of her hands into the water<\/p>\n
and began to splash<\/p>\n
and smile<\/p>\n
and the blessing words that she spoke were,<\/p>\n
“thank you, God, thank you”<\/p>\n
and the splashing holy water\u00a0landed on\u00a0the girl child, and the priest, and the altar, and more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
the girl child came early to church to help prepare the sanctuary place the candles put the ribbons into the book in the right places place flowers in vases for the altar she vacuumed and swept even used Windex and newspaper on the stained glass…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":803,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,1136],"tags":[246,1738],"class_list":["post-23321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","category-miscellaneous","category-official-marathon-prompts","tag-blessing","tag-praise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/803"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23321"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23489,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23321\/revisions\/23489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}