The Hymns in the Dishwater

Margaret Chen never sat her children down for formal devotions. She tried once, in 1987, with a flannel board and a lesson plan she'd photocopied from the church library. It lasted eleven minutes before her youngest knocked over the grape juice.

So Margaret did what she knew. She sang. Every evening, standing at the kitchen sink in their small house on Birch Street in Duluth, she sang hymns while she scrubbed the casserole dishes. "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" when the bills stacked up. "It Is Well with My Soul" the winter her husband lost his job at the paper mill. Her children heard those songs not as performance but as prayer — the sound of a woman who believed the Almighty was listening even over running water.

Thirty years later, her daughter Lisa was unpacking boxes in her first home in Portland when she caught herself humming. She stopped, dish in hand, suds dripping onto the linoleum. It was "Be Thou My Vision." She hadn't chosen it. It had simply risen, the way water finds its level.

Proverbs 22:6 doesn't promise that training will look like a curriculum. Sometimes it looks like a mother's voice carrying through a kitchen — steady, faithful, almost unconscious — shaping the melody her children will hum for the rest of their lives.