Children's Message Used "Horton Hears A Who" By ...

: Children’s message used "Horton Hears a Who" by Dr. Seuss

The children’s message this morning gave us one literary vision of being “neighborly”. Horton, the elephant heard a cry for help and did all in his power (even amid the teasing of his friends) to protect the small people, affirming his belief that A person’s a person, no matter how small. But now, hear these immortal words:

…The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

’Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ’Good fences make good neighbors’…

Good fences make good neighbors? Well, at least that’s what the neighbor believes in this poem by Robert Frost.

From Beth Garrod-Logsdon’s Sermon: What to do When You Hear the Critics