The Midnight Fair, by Gideon Sterer and Mariachiara Di Giorgio, is a sweet, wordless picture book about forest animals visiting a traveling fair at night when all the humans have gone home. The illustrations depict the animals having fun on the rides, playing at the arcade games, and eating treats from the food stalls. A touching detail shows the animals’ form of payment: acorns, pinecones, and other gifts of the forest, left behind in gratitude in lieu of money.
It occurs to me that when we do hishtadlus, we are offering up our own acorns and pinecones. Not that what we do doesn’t matter – it does – but what we do to help ourselves is more about what it does for us than what it does for Hashem. We express our agency and dignity, our courage and commitment, through the actions we take, but Hashem doesn’t rely on them. Sometimes what we can offer is very small, sometimes it is larger, but I think we can trust that whatever size it is, it doesn’t change the outcome of what is meant to be.
(Photo credit: John Baker/Pexels)
I saw something beautiful, that every act of hishtadlus we do is really a prayer of action. Sometimes we pray with words and sometimes we pray with our actions.
Wow, I love that, that’s amazing.