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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Addison Jones knows that the detail is where the meaning lives. On art day in Sister Suarez's classroom she builds a paper street so lovely the whole class gathers to look at it — gold-paper windows, a striped awning, a tiny dog on the corner. Three tables over, a boy named Dexter is working just as hard on a street of his own. Then a jar of muddy rinse water goes over, and in the space of one second Dexter's whole world is ruined, the room leans away, and there is no grown-up in the doorway to fix it. What Addison does next costs her a good sweater, a pretty pair of hands, and the admiration she had been quietly enjoying — and she finds out that the prettiest thing in the room was never on anybody's desk at all.

Scripture: Mark 10:43-44; Philippians 2:3 (KJV).

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Every Sunday the Pastor's family sits in the pew right in front of the Joneses — Pastor Garrett, Sister Garrett, and their littlest, Houston, who is just about Andy's age and just about Andy's favorite person in the world. The two of them have struck up the wobbly, joyful friendship of two two-year-olds. Which is exactly why it is such a catastrophe when they get into it over Andy's red ball, right in the middle of service. The babies are over it in roughly four seconds.

The Jones sisters are not.

Certain that somebody must be right and somebody must be wrong, the girls set out to settle the case — and end up in a far bigger fight than the one they were trying to judge. A warm story about brotherly love, and about the wide difference between keeping the peace and keeping score.

Scripture: Matthew 5:9; Ephesians 4:32 (KJV).

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