Marijke’s cousin, Mrs. V, teaches 4th grade at a Catholic school in Orange County. Every year they adopt a class missions project or missionary to sponsor. This year, our team has been adopted. Apparently, this means that every couple of months we get a big package full of adorable cards and a random assortment of food. I say a random assortment, because we’re pretty sure that half the kids just grab something from their lunch bag and toss it into our box on the day that the package is being assembled. Which, yay! Princess fruit snacks! Gushers! Spiderman fruit roll-ups! Little Pringle packets!

Mrs. V usually throws in some extra goodies from Trader Joe’s, and we all end up feeling very loved and well fed. And then there are the cards. Oh how I do love the cards. One card was covered in an explosion of fireworks, each firework made up of painstakingly tiny lines connected with dots. And while it’s pretty obvious that Mrs. V writes a few “suggested phrases” on the board for the kids to use in the cards, they still manage to excercise their creative writing skills.

Three of my favorites:

The one on the left is pretty typical. The same “Happy New Year,” and “Thank you for spreading God’s word.” But I love this one for all the little encouraging exclamations scattered throughout the card, including: “go team,” “you are the best,” “you are the light of the world,” and my personal favorite, “you can do it!”

The middle one reads: “Dear Marijke and her your team, Happy New Year! We are all praying for you. Thank you for spreading gGod’s word. That is so nice of you. Love, Hayley.” But that’s not even the best part, the second page of the card has an acrostic poem for Marijke:

trying to Make people believe in God

hAve to eat wierd food

doing the Right thing

God is lookIing out for you

Just believe in God

being given snacKs by Mrs. V’s class

want to, but can’t comE home for a year.

The one on the right alludes in comic form to the gift that came from this little boy:

Character 1: “What are the three words you say when it’s 2009?”

Character 2: “Truffles are good.”

I think I’m going to adopt that as a kind of mantra. Because you know? Truffles are good.

As an honorable mention, another card read: “We are praying for you, and so is God.” So, thank you Mrs. V’s class. And thank you God.