Sunday School, revisited

I seem to have confused several people with my previous post on this topic, and on re-reading it, I can see why! What can I say: I wrote it late at night!

To set the record straight, I think children's programming in churches is valuable.  Kids are not mini adults; they are more active, more impulsive, concrete thinkers, and hands-on learners.  So if kids are going to get much out of a religious experience, whether it's designed just for children or for all ages, it needs to be designed to take advantage of the characteristics they have.  My grandma also made an excellent point that children whose families don't go to church are more likely to come to (and benefit from) a Sunday School or a children's church rather than an adult-oriented service.

What I intended to object to were the following:

1.  Children and youth being completely segregated from adults, so that they never see people of other ages, developmental stages and lengths of spiritual experience interacting with God.  I cannot tell you how much I've learned about God and faith through interacting with others who were at different stages than I was.  This was true of me as a child and teen watching adults, but it's still true of me as an adult being with children and young people.  We of different ages need each other to be the whole body of Christ.

2.  Sunday School curricula that focus on information but neglect engagement.  It's great for kids to know what's inside the Bible, but knowledge alone doesn't lead to transformation.  (This is an issue for adults, too!) In addition to learning the stories, we need to learn how to wrestle with and listen to the God who stars in the stories, and we need to learn how to let the stories shed light on our daily lives.  A good teacher will make space for this regardless of how the curriculum is written, but it would be better to have curriculum written in such a way that the target outcome is not to have kids able to tell you facts about what they learned today (as if it were a math or spelling lesson) but to have them come out having engaged with God in some way, and able to continue to engage during the rest of the week.  (I am not saying Sunday schools should trade Bible stories for something else--that would be a terrible loss!--but that children should be led to interact with stories in such a way that they don't just learn the information contained in them, but develop a way of relating to the Bible, and to God, that will follow them into adulthood.)

The church we visited on Sunday was opposite in many ways from the previous week--large, lots of children and children's programming completely separate from "big church" (although I was pleased to see that children seemed to be welcome in the service if their parents chose to bring them in), good expository sermon which made a rather difficult passage in Romans clearer to me than it has been in the past, and a keen awareness of God's work in the rest of the world.  I liked it, but I don't know that we're going to settle there.  However, I'm thinking about putting Esther in their AWANA program (Bible memorization program for little ones) for this semester.  I think she would love it, and it will give her some continuity in the people she sees each week until we find a church home.

Went hiking today

Life according to Esther

As you may have noticed, I like to write down Esther's latest funny sayings from time to time, so I won't forget them.  And why not share them while I'm at it?  So here is the latest installment.

In addition to "wacket jellos," Esther sometimes gets other beginning consonants switched.  My favorite is "runny babbit" (bunny rabbit).

Esther is turning out to be not much of a milk drinker, like her mommy.  :-(  One day recently I gave her a cup of milk at both breakfast and lunch, only to throw it away several hours later when I discovered it still untouched at her place.  However, she will usually drink chocolate milk.  (I also push other sources of dairy and calcium.)  So the other day I asked her whether she wanted chocolate milk or plain milk, and she said she wanted plain milk.  I was a little dubious, so I asked her again and got the same answer.  When I brought her the milk, she looked into her cup, looked up with an injured expression, and said, "But I thought you were going to give me chocolate milk!"

Esther for a while was begging us every few hours for a "jumpoline."  I thought at first that it was a cute neologism, but apparently there is such a product, and she enjoyed the use of one at her gymastics class.  We would like to buy her some jumping apparatus, but want to make sure it is safe, durable (reviews of the jumpoline have left me with some concerns in this category), and doesn't violate the terms of our homeowners insurance.  Meanwhile, she has mostly given up bugging us about it, but yesterday she jumped up in the middle of her Donut Hole video for the express purpose of coming and telling me, "I'm waiting so patiently for my jumpoline."  So I guess the idea has not died!

Today we opened our new bank account.  The woman who walked us through this process was lovely with Esther, getting her a coloring book, finding official-looking pieces of paper for her to write on, and being very patient with her wiggles.  Towards the end of the process, this woman printed out some information about our account and highlighted key facts as she went over it with us.  So then Esther wanted to use her highlighter to write on the "account number" (a packet of general bank information, I think) that this woman had given her.  The woman said it was just fine with her if it was okay with us, and I said that Esther sometimes uses our highlighters at home.  At which point Esther piped up, "I usually do things that my mommy and daddy don't let me do."

We made it!

Backing up a bit (by nearly three weeks, to be precise), we are in our new house!  We are renting right now, but some of the repairs required by the mortgage appraiser have been already taken care of, and the rest should take place next week, so we are hoping to close in early September.  Meanwhile, it is good to feel a little settled.  Mind you, there are still stacks of unpacked boxes in nearly every room of the house, including the living room and kitchen.  But we can eat, sleep, clothe ourselves and attend to personal hygiene without having to spend 15 minutes of every thirty hunting for that one crucial item that we distinctly remember seeing within the last few hours but can't for the life of us remember where.  Tim has begun classes, and thinks it is going to be a fun semester.  I am loving watching him have a job that he is excited about!  Esther has started to daycare two mornings a week.  The first time she was pretty clingy when I dropped her off, and apparently kept her blankie with her all morning.  Today (her second day) she seems to feel more at ease.  I've stayed on campus this week so I can be immediately available if she needs me, but eventually I will stay home on her daycare days and have four glorious hours all to myself!  Don't worry, I won't have any trouble filling them.  I've also started volunteering in the International student office, although I'm not sure what form that will take over time.  Right now I'm tutoring a Bulgarian student on the TOEFL.

Anyway, here are some highlights from our move.

Some "oops" moments:
--We packed the DVD player up with a library CD still inside it.
--When we drove down the first time, using a van borrowed from a friend, we tied Esther's (disassembled) crib up on top to give us extra space.  Our first evening in the house, in the process of unpacking the van, we untied it.  Tim started, and then I finished while he carried some things inside.  When I finished, Esther was sitting on the tailgate of the van.  I wasn't sure how heavy the crib sides were and didn't want to risk dropping them on her, so I left them for later.  A little while after that, while driving to the grocery store, we heard scraping sounds.  We asked each other, "What was that noise?"  We couldn't see anything moving in the back of the van, but figured that the noise must come from some of our stuff shifting around.  A little while later we heard even louder scraping noises...and looked behind us to see one of her crib sides go sailing into the road!  Thankfully it did not land on another car or cause an accident.  Tim pulled the van over onto the shoulder and went running back to retrieve it before it got run over.  We pulled all the parts of the crib off the roof, found a place to shove them in the van, and went on to the store, feeling sheepish.  I've heard of people forgetting things on the roof of their car before, but not an entire crib!
--In our first week in the house we managed to break not one but two of the knick-knacks the owner had left behind!  (And neither incident was Esther's fault!)  We were relieved to find out that the owner didn't want them and had had no intention of taking them.  He left a number of things in the house for us, some more useful than others, but we will enjoy the useful and beautiful ones and take the rest to the Salvation Army.  Our first couple of days there we particularly appreciated that he had left hand soap and dish soap!

Things we like about the house:
--We love our back deck!  It is a lovely place to eat a snack or meal, and we can see stars!  On one of the nights of the Perseid meteor shower Tim and I stood out there for a while craning our neck at the sky and saw a blazing shooting star, by far the biggest and brightest I've ever seen!
--We love not having any neighbor under us to complain about Esther making noise during the day (our previous neighbor worked night shift).  Esther has run and jumped and bounced loud balls to her hearts content.  Every once in a while she'll comment, "There's nobody downstairs."  (We haven't quite escaped the issue of neighbor noise, however--some kids a few houses down have this thing for setting off firecrackers right around Esther's bedtime.  At least they're not too loud.)
--We love how it cools down at nights.  Most nights we sleep with the windows open and the fan going, and we can hear cicadas!
--We love all the space.  And multiple bathrooms!  No more taking a shower with the door unlocked in case a family member needs to get in to use the toilet.
--Our long, flat driveway is perfect for sidewalk chalk and scooter riding.

Things we don't like about the house:
--All that space?  There are more places to lose things.  Esther tends to take off her sandals and put down her blankie in the most random places, and then get upset when she can't find them.  And there are a lot of times I've been in a bathroom and wanted some bathroom item only to realize that it's in a different bathroom.

--We've found a few pests--a trio of large ants exploring the bedroom, a carpenter bee boring a hole in one of the supports for the railing on our deck, and most importantly, two nests of yellow jackets (Esther referred to them last night as yacket jellos) in the back yard!  The guy that we are currently paying to mow our lawn discovered one nest "the hard way" (multiple stings on his face,  ouch!) when he was mowing on behalf of the house's owner earlier this summer.  He discovered the second one (though without getting stung this time) while mowing for us on Saturday.  I read up on exterminating them, but the consensus of the articles seemed to be that  if you discover them this late in the season you run a higher risk of getting stung while removing them (because the nests are largest and most active in late summer and early fall) and have less time to wait before the first frost will do the dirty work for you, so you might as well leave them alone.  So that is what we're going to do, but in the meantime, we're staying out of the back yard!  Sometimes in the late morning I can see yellow jackets shooting up into the sky just beyond our porch.  Pretty, but I would enjoy the sight more if I didn't know what they were!  (Once the wasps are dead, we're going to fill in the holes with dirt and rocks so we don't get them again next summer.)

--Utility bills--they were included in our rent in our old apartment, so having to pay them ourselves is giving us sticker shock!  That's another good reason not to run our air conditioning.

--While Esther can get way more active inside the house than formerly, I miss having  a playground or park within walking distance.  There aren't even sidewalks  for a few blocks around us, although there is so little traffic that it's safe enough to walk, even with Esther.  We walked to the library a couple of weeks ago and that was fine.

Serendipity

--The best thing about our new house is our new neighbors!  Within a few days of us being there, no less than four people came over to introduce themselves and tell us to be sure to knock on their door if we needed any help with anything.  One of them even brought a chocolate cake!  We are also really enjoying our Lebanese neighbors next-door, whom we had met earlier.  Their little girl is about a year and a half younger than Esther, so it will be a while before they can really play together, but they are fascinated with each other and we have visited back and forth several times.

--The first Sunday we were at our new home, as I was standing outside directing movers, I heard church bells chime the time, followed by a lovely rendition of several hymns!  It was a  moment of oasis in a hectic day.  I have since discovered that the chimes are played every day (or nearly every day) a little after 9 and a little after 5.  I usually can't hear them at all from inside, and can't always hear them well even outside, but I love it when I do!

--I love keeping up on the weather, and two of the things the owner left behind were an indoor/outdoor temperature gauge (sometime I have long been ambitious to own!), and in the front yard, a darling little bunny sculpture clasping a rain gauge in his arms!  I have been enjoying checking the rain gauge, and Esther likes to water the plants with it (never mind that if there's been enough rain to put water in it, the plants are already sopping wet).

Sunday school, the emerging church, and the Donut Man

I've been thinking.  (Whenever I tell Tim that, he says, "Again?!")

We missed church two Sundays in a row (once because our movers were moving our stuff in and once because we were on our way back from a weekend trip to Maryland), but we finally got to start our church hunt this past Saturday.  There is an Episcopal church not too far from us that I was interested in trying, and a couple of churches that Tim had found and liked the sound of, so we decided to start with the closest one and go to the Episcopal church.  We were a little unnerved to pull into the parking lot ten minutes before the service was due to start and see only two cars.  I suggested hopefully that maybe a lot of the congregation walked.  At about that moment a woman dressed in church clothes (this is definitely a dress-up-for-church kind of community!) did come walking into the parking lot, and when asked, assured us that there would be a church service happening at the appointed time, and walked us into the building and introduced us to the people who would be leading the service.  The pastor--excuse me, priest--was on vacation, so it was to be a "service of prayer" rather than a "eucharistic service."  We sat in the second pew, only to find when the rest of the congregation trickled in that nobody sits further up than the middle.  The congregation that day consisted of us, a woman who (I think) used to attend there but now lives in Florida, a family with two high-school-age children who were also there for the first time, and something on the order of seven church members, whose average age I suspect was over 70.  There was (obviously) no children's program.  I had brought Esther a puzzle book, but had not remembered her notepad and not thought to bring food, usually the most reliable method for keeping her quiet in a formal setting.  The service itself was lovely, lots of responsive readings and scripture passages punctuated with hymns.  The "homily" was short, but I got as much out of it as I have many longer ones.  Esther got really into the readings, earnestly studying her bulletin and "reading" along with us in nonsense syllables.  She also enthusiastically "sang" the hymns.  For one of them, the music stopped and she kept going for a few beats, then suddenly realized that no-one else was singing and ceased abruptly.  It was very cute!  At the end, though, there was a long series of "collects" (short prayers) which were read one after the other by a reader and did not involve congregational moving or vocalizing.  I missed most of these because Esther was squirming (as in, opening and closing the kneeler, wandering from one end of the pew to the other, and dropping down on her tummy and heading for the aisle), and then whining audibly when I sat her in my lap.  I have mixed feelings about having Esther in a church service with me.  On the one hand, I want her to experience church.  Whenever I'm in a church I feel a sense of being home, and I want that for her.  On the other hand, I worry that I run the risk of introducing church as a place where she gets in trouble for being who God made her to be.  But I can't simply let her behave as she normally would, because others would be distracted.  No-one complained on Sunday (in fact, one person complimented me afterwards on her good behavior!), but Tim and I talked later about how we really want to be part of a church that is in some way geared for children.  (It would also be really nice to be part of a church where some people aren't of European descent.)  We asked Esther over dinner what she had thought about church and she said she liked it.  We asked what she liked about it and she promptly answered, "I liked the God."  If we only knew what experience was described with that statement!

So after going to church, I was already thinking about children's church vs. children being in the adult service.  Our former church a couple of years ago went through a whole visioning process about the role of children and youth within the body, and one of the key values that came out of that was wanting children to feel, especially at important times in the church calendar like Christmas and Easter, that spirituality was not just a grown-up thing, but something that everybody does.  And segregating ages, while it does allow for more targeted teaching content and styles, can also lead to children viewing adult worship as a) incomprehensible and weird, b) boring and irrelevant, or c) an elite club that you have to earn membership into.  From my own experience, I've attended all-ages worship services since about Esther's age.  Many of those times most of the service went over my head, particularly since it was often in a language I didn't understand.  But I did witness people of all ages valuing God and honoring God in different ways.  And these ways went deeper than the platitudes (God wants us to be helpers.  God wants us to obey our parents.) that are "the point" of many a Sunday-school lesson.  Not that the above statements aren't true and important, but being able to recite "the point" and give an example of it from a Bible story never went as deep for me as watching adults I respected actually helping others, or actually wrestling with what it means to submit to authority.  I'm sure most of my spiritual formation happened through spending time with my parents, and most of the rest through watching and being with other adults who had deep relationships with God.  Very little if any came from Sunday school.  (And honestly, in cases where children are deeply influenced by Sunday school, I suspect it has more to do with their relationship with the teacher than it does with the curriculum.)  The curricula that I've taught in the past have more to do with being able to repeat dos and don'ts and Bible story plots than they do with learning to wrestle with God, and God's word, and our complex lives, without the guarantee of coming up with a pat answer over the course of an hour.

Meanwhile, a friend forwarded me an article co-written by the former pastor (now a full-time writer and speaker) of my former church.  He and several other scholars and church leaders wrestled with the question of spiritual formation for children in the emerging church movement.  The article talked at length about the role of community in spiritual formation, and argued that however children's participation in church is structured, children need to spend extensive time with adults (not necessarily being taught by them, but experiencing how they live and relate to God) and need to feel like full citizens of their community.

The same afternoon that I read that portion of the article, I sat down with Esther to watch an old "Donut Hole Repair Club" video.  I first ran across this series of Christian children's musicals in high school, and despite some hokey acting (think "Barney"), and the fact that they were geared for younger children, I really enjoyed them.  The music is fabulous, and the Easter episode routinely moves me to tears as it makes Jesus' triumph over death feel so real.  Watching this one as a parent, I was moved to tears again to see spiritual formation in action.  The plot was that the Donut Hole Repair Club (a group of kids), led by the Donut Man, were trying to refurbish the Celebration House, a place for anyone to come and find a place to sleep, someone to talk to, or a great meal.  When they despair at the size of the job, the Donut Man is reminded of the story of Joshua, and leads them in a rousing rendition of it, followed by a prayer asking God's help for this overwhelming task.  When one boy confesses that sometimes he doesn't feel like helping, the Donut Man shares that sometimes he doesn't feel like it either, but when that happens, he prays for God to change his heart, and God always does.  And so it goes: insights from the Bible, personal experience from a fellow traveler on the spiritual journey, and lots of opportunities for prayer and praise, all beautifully intertwined with the details of what would otherwise have been just a noble chore.  I so want to teach Esther that way!  And as a necessary foundation, I so want to be the kind of person who lives that way myself!  I do some...but I want to do it more!

None of this, of course, answers the question of where we'll go to church, or even exactly what we're looking for.  But I'll keep thinking.

a new mommy

Today at dinner, out of the blue, Esther looked up at me and declared, "If I had a new mommy I would cry and cry, because I want you."  I don't think this is the kind of thing that most three-year-olds think about.  Then again, one of her favorite books right now is an adoption story where a baby is described meeting her new mommy and daddy.  She didn't sound worried, but just in case, I assured her that she won't have any more new mommies, that when we adopted her it was forever.  And I was reminded again of the enormity of this transition that we expect children to make easily because they're little and adaptable.  And they are...but I don't think we often appreciate just how much.

A little later on in the evening Esther was out of sorts because she wasn't allowed to eat dinner while holding her blankie in her chair.  She pouted dramatically, explained, "I have a mad face," laid her head down on her blankie, and then asked me to pray for her head so it would feel better.  I'm not sure in what way her head was bothering her, but was encouraged that she herself thought of praying as a way of helping her situation.  She did seem to feel better afterwards, although she was obviously very, very tired.  It appears we are still in recovery mode!

It's over!

One extended power outage (think packing with no air conditioning or lights, while cooking with no oven and piling dirty dishes in a stopped-up sink with a non-functional garbage disposal), two weeks of gymnastics classes for Esther and "vacation" days for Tim, three nasty colds (one for each of us), four professional movers, and countless hours later...we're moved!  Moved out, that is.  We're now staying at the home of generous friends while we wait for our new house to become available and deal with the stuff that the movers didn't take.  Some of it is slated to be given away, some is food items that we are still trying to use up, some consists of items that we deliberately saved out so that we could have the use of them as soon as we move in (the moving company we used gives themselves a rather large window of time to make the drop-off), and a rather larger amount than we would have liked consists of items we could have sent with the movers but didn't get sorted and boxed in time.  It took us two and a half days after the movers left to organize our remaining stuff and get the apartment cleaned.  We finally locked our door for the last time and dropped our keys off on Sunday night.  Yesterday was all about recovery--and trying to manage the tasks of daily living when we couldn't find anything!  Today I am doing loads of laundry and trying to reorganize our belongings.  Tomorrow we'll drop off our giveaway stuff at the various locations that it's slated for, and have a farewell lunch with Tim's colleagues.  Saturday will most likely be the day we make our drive down to our new house.  Our mortgage has been delayed yet again--there are some things about the house that the mortgage appraiser is requiring to be fixed before we can be approved--but the owner is allowing us to rent in the interim, and we can move in on Saturday.

Anyway, the biggest hurdle of our move has been accomplished.  Unpacking will be a lot of work, but I can take my time about it, and most of the boxes are pretty well organized.

Esther has done remarkably well with this move.  She went through a period right before we found out we were moving where she was having significant issues with what looked like separation anxiety--she couldn't fall asleep at night unless one of us was sitting where she could see us, would wake up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep at all for several hours, and had a couple of meltdowns over being apart from us (something she did only very briefly at the age where that's usual).  So I was expecting her to have the same issues and then some the whole time we were packing and moving, but she has been fine.  Just in the last few days she has been a little extra clingy and wanting to be carried everywhere, but after all the disruption and transitions I think she's entitled to that!  (I am SO glad I went ahead and ordered a new mei tai carrier for her, as there were several times I really had to get something done and she really wanted to be carried, but willingly accepted being up on my back in the carrier while I packed.)

Esther is awake now.  I asked her what she wanted me to write about moving and she said, "Esther and Daddy.  And you!"

She also wanted to type herself.  Here is her contribution:

  v f'flhki,bvialhbihnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn".
eSxz'sswkswot6[--                   nn  mmm    frk>o6     epZS'DF;KOPKKI