It was an incredibly hot day for my kids’ usual soccer practice. Texas is always hot from about May to mid-October but this was the kind of heat that felt suffocating. I only set up my lawn chair and already I could feel the sweat trickling down my back.

About mid-way through my son’s hour-long practice, a player from the team of seven- and eight-year-olds that practiced nearby came running to his mother, the classic kid-whine like a siren blaring from his lips – not quite a full-out cry but a signal to all parents everywhere that here is a kid who wants your attention. His mom turned out to be the attractive dark-haired woman sitting next to me with her younger child.

I couldn’t quite catch all the details but there was some crisis about what the other boys on his team had said about a pass he had made or failed to make, about how terrible he was at soccer, about how he never wanted to play again and he was never going back.

Inwardly, I groaned in sympathy. I hate these kinds of interactions with my own kids. They feel loaded. It’s like this landmine of honoring their feelings but also teaching them how to deal with criticism and learn how to be in relationship with others. Somehow, it’s not just about practice right now; it’s also one more opportunity to mold them into human beings that can handle criticism with grace, empathize with others and persevere when things get tough. And it’s about convincing them not to quit because you paid a lot of money for them to play soccer! If I were in that mom’s shoes (and I have been and I will be again!), I thought, how would I handle this?

So I eavesdropped on her conversation with her kid over the next eight or ten minutes. It was not easy. But she handled it really well. She made some of the same decisions I would have made but she also said a few things that wouldn’t have occurred to me to say and she held back where I would have jumped in in a way that seemed wise. I admired her ability to parent well under pressure.

So, when her kid finally went back to his team – with about two minutes to spare before practice ended anyways (of course) – I shared my admiration.

“Well done,” I told her. “That was a hard one but I thought you handled that really well. Just saying, you know, as one mom to another.”

She seemed appreciative of my interference and we spoke for another few minutes about the difficulties of parenthood – and of being a kid, too, honestly – in this day and age. And then our boys came running off the fields and we all loaded up our SUVs and headed off into the sunset.

Until the next practice.

Because that woman, that mother-in-arms in the fray that is modern parenting, sought me out at the next practice to tell me how much my compliment meant to her. “I even wrote an article about it for my substack,” she said.

I usually spend the hour of soccer practice reading a book or catching up on work or brushing up on vocab on DuoLingo. But I think those days of finding something to do in the Texas heat are gone. From now on, I’ll spend that hour chitchatting with my new friend Vanessa, swapping stories about growing into the full stature of who we were made to be even as we try to help our children do that, too.

It was a one-off comment on the soccer field a few days ago. It was me knowing in my bones that these moments with our children are so important and I so often feel like I’m not quite failing but not quite succeeding either and I just wanted to ease another parent’s sense of that if I could. It was such a small thing. And it made such a big impact. The ripple effects of which are still being felt.

The days of this past month or so, the days I know are coming just ahead, they feel really dark. My ancestral homeland is being obliterated. My people are being murdered and maligned. And beyond Palestine, cruelty and suffering and meanness and the tragic effects of human greed and pride just abound. It can feel overwhelming, paralyzing. Because I have no control, no power to do anything about any of it.

But that’s not quite true. My power may not be great, but it is not useless, either. Every kindness, however small, is a gut-punch to cruelty everywhere. Even the tiniest flame beats back with remarkable strength the darkness that threatens us all.

Yes, they are dark days. Very dark days indeed. But my little exchange on the soccer sideline has reminded me of the hope of my faith that I’ll be clinging to in the midst of the suffering and sinfulness abounding, in the midst of my failures and my fears. It is our Easter hope:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”

This light of mine, this God-given light of mine, little though it may be… I’m gonna let it shine, friends. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. And by God, the darkness will not overcome it.