The Unflinching Offering of a Child

  Silence bit through sullenly, oppressively. The air was thick with the buzzing of unspoken thoughts, questions, someone's lost "good-morning."
  It was too early to be singing. Or was it? Is it ever too early to worship God?
  The crowd didn't answer the question. They accepted it as fact. So when someone begged for songs to praise Christ with, eyes darted, mouths curled into crooked corners, everyone waited for someone else with a bigger and braver heart to begin.
  Courage is sometimes a difficult thing to find in a room full of strangers. It doesn't often make its presence felt. The funny thing about children -- they pick up courage as easily as black sweaters pick up white cat hair. Children snatch courage from hidden places: bravery is innate, fearfulness frowned upon.
  The begging of a song. The touches of the somnolent summer sun. The long and laborious waiting.    
  And then... the unflinching offering of a child.
  A voice conquered the silence. A melody, tune, composition of notes poured forth, leaking onto the singer's brown-like-coffee hands. The girl, for it was indeed a child, plucked the song from the air -- timidly at first, then with surety, raised it up in her hands, holding it towards heaven, volunteering her offering, no matter how small.
  And we were awe-struck. The brown-sugar-sticky hands of a child holding the glassy and glistening pieces of a melody. She had dared to do what we were all too apathetic and afraid to do. She had given God all she had, tipping out her heart so that the contents over-flowed, leaped, splashed into her hands, dripped over the sides, were handed to her neighbors to satiate their thirst then presented to God as a sacrifice.