Children, Ready to Bloom
Kate Moorehead is a colleague who’s dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Jacksonville, Florida. She writes, How many children have the resurrection life within them, ready to bloom with the slightest bit of encouragement? This weekend on our way to worship, you and I’ll see plenty of these children.
Kate continues, How many children could be raised up from hopelessness to joy through the simple embrace of a community that adores them? This weekend in worship, we’ll encounter these children. Will ours be a community that adores them?
More from Kate: Sometimes I marvel at how much of a difference the church can make in the life of a person. How can this be? Kate answers that with her next sentence, We are the bearers of Christ’s love to the world.
Go over that one again with me, please — We are the bearers of Christ’s love to the world. And, boom…there it is: our job description today: We are the bearers of Christ’s love to the world.
By the grace of God, may it be so, and may it be so in and through us.
To what purpose? Again, listen to Kate: Once we unleash that potential, there is no telling what we can accomplish.
Ready? By the grace of God, go!
joescheets 
I had had my suspicions for a while, but being the mother-IN-LAW, I posed the question to him Easter Sunday, “Do you go to Sunday school the same time as Tara (my 10-year-old granddaughter) every week? You do have Sunday school?” You see, because my daughter works for Wal-Mart and they don’t believe in church, my granddaughter and her father have attended his church, the Lutheran church.
Mind you, we are standing out in front of his church and his mom is there. He turned a little pink in the cheek, sheepishly looked at his mom and said, “Well,” adjusting his collar, “I haven’t been really good about getting her here.”
I pressed further because I had been thinking about it a great bit of late, “You know, she is old enough for a Junior camp if they still have them at Little Grassy, I think she would love it!”
His mom chimed in, “We (the Lutherans) have church camp too! She would LOVE it Travis, I’ll pay for it.” At this point I am at a loss, I can’t offer to pay for anything!
He is scrambling as he tries to take pictures of Tara with me, “Well, she goes to Vacation Bible School in the summers.”
Again the mothers, almost in unison, “ONE WEEK in the summer?????”
I am leaving out all the arguments in my head about how it has to be there, repetitive, being buried in you so when that tightrope breaks (if it breaks, in my experience it breaks and even a new one can break and on and on) you have that thing to grab that you didn’t know you needed. I am afraid to talk too much around him, to fuel his arguments to my daughter that I am not a good influence on my granddaughter as I am too obsessed with “fill-in-the-blank”.
You, with this series the past few days, have made me realize why I have been asking these questions. Someone, a couple of weeks ago, asked me about my years (seven of them) in Job’s Daughters did anything for me or if it was just a good time. I couldn’t have been more passionate with my response. The organization was the youth female offshoot of Masons, but the teachings were all from the book of Job. Twice a month, the ceremonies were all filled with Job’s story and his sacrifice. I especially looked forward to initiations. It wasn’t greased pigs, though we did perpetuate the myth. It was telling a new person or persons, in detail, the story of Job — his life, his story, his troubles — his monumental faith in the face of the former, his testing, and his reward for his patience in his faith. I can’t count the number of times those lessons have shored my own Faith in clenches.
Back to my son-in-law, his mother and I got no definitive answers. He did say she wanted to go to a writing, a drama, and a music camp this summer. His mother and I, again in unison, said , “SEND her!” His mother again added that she would pay for church camp in addition to making sure she
gets to Bible School.
I just worry, though I know her mother, uncle and aunt have it in the event they realize they find need of it, I don’t want her to not have that tether, the deeper roots. Like me, the twins and their sister started their Bible learning in the church nursery. There are friends from school where people will ask us how long we have been friends and we answer, “since the church nursery crib room.” I KNOW it is why, at this very moment in time, it is why I am still standing.
We must, must fertilize and water those blooms steadily and carefully!!
[Disclaimer: If this makes little sense, I kept getting interrupted.]
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