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February 07, 2005

She Can Speak!

I'm rather insecure with my role as a Sunday School teacher. It touches on alot of things, such as whether or not I posses the skills to care for them practically -like whiping their hands and faces after snack time- or whether or not I can effect the needed facial expression and tone to garner obedience without some near-empty threat of a parental-given spanking.

Yesterday I had a wholly new insecurity: while Cornerstone does get the occasional visitor to its worship service it hardly if ever gets visitors to Sunday School. I think its just one of those understood things shared by believer and non-believer alike: Sunday School is simply not one of those places you just visit; one must posses a certain commitment to a given church body and its long-established traditions of complete blandness before you start attending it's "Sunday School." Yet this past Sunday, for some strange reason, a young couple strolled into Cornerstone on Sunday Morning with two daughters in tow; and one of them happened to be of the right age for my class.

Now I've grown quite comfortable with Isabelle, Josiah, and recent new-comer Knox. We've got our established routines and faustian arrangements which maintain the peace every Sunday morning between 9:45 and 10:45. I've given them my self-respect, and they give up their God-given right to something better. We all sleep well, and somewhere along the way their vocabularly increases, they learn a Bible story or two, and I get to feel like I'm contributing to the church beyond a self-interested bitterness over a lack of vision.

The addition of another member to the class, no, the idea of the addition of another member to the class threw me into something of a tailspin. I felt like I was back on my first day at a new highschool. "Will I be cool enough?" "Did I bring enough materials?" "I hope they don't smell the cigarette smoke on me". Of course I saw the parents sizing me up: "who is this young punk kid? do we dare entrust him with the well-being of our daughter? Is the sweet, sweet joy of having an unpaid baby-sitter for an hour enough to risk her physical and spiritual safety? Why is the floor purple linoleum? Is that kid licking the floor?"

I think I learned something though 'bout parents: remember when you were 16 and your parents gave you the car for the first time? Remember those first steps of what felt like pure, un-adulterated freedom when you first landed at college? Remember ditching classes your senior year of highschool? Remember your first stolen, clumsy make-out session underneath the bleachers in junior high? Remember your first ecstacy binge? in their eyes I saw the choice they had to make between freedom and responsibility, and they chose freedom.

Of course their freedom involved spending over an hour in the next building listening to the dry, bare-boned tenants of Calvinism distilled into a form that even Isabelle, Josiah, and Knox could understand. But hey man, you take what you can get. I saw them linger and then watch me begin to conduct the class. I also saw the pep in their step when they made the turn for the door without ever looking back. Just be back by 11. I'm not waiting up.

So now we come to the end of this somewhat cynical story. I suppose I should end it with a "funny" from the class. The aforementioned new girl was an infinitely well behaved student, very attentive, and addicted to the color navy blue. She didn't say a peep for the first 45 minutes of class until the very end when she said "I love Jesus" very clearly and distinctly. To which Josiah quickly remaked "oh wow! She can speak!" with big wide eyes. It had me in stitches.

The lesson in general was about the gifts we give to our Savior, and that our lives are one of those gifts. We spent about 10 minutes playing this game where we took turns saying what we needed to give to Jesus, including things like "Kitties". At one point Josiah said in a tone about as imperatively as a three year old can muster: "sometimes I get angry, I give that to Jesus" at which point realized that they probably understand the whole exercise better than I ever will.