Twenty-one years ago, my sister Katey and I taught a Sunday School class at our church in Texas of fifteen or sixteen 5-year-olds who had not yet started Kindergarten. Only three of them were girls. The other dozen or more were boys. Active, rowdy, real life boys. Almost everyone in that rather large church knew we had the most challenging group of kids, simply because most Sundays we had ten or twelve boys on our hands and maybe two girls. There was certainly never a dull moment! It’s hard to believe those kids are now in their late twenties. Some of them are probably even married!
Today Emry’s Sunday School class looks almost exactly the same: about ten boys and maybe three little girls. Most often it’s just Emry surrounded by bundles of activity with names like Caleb, Hudson, Michael, Judah, Harrison, Asher, Seth…you get the picture. One little girl in her pretty dresses in the midst of more energy than I probably ever had even a moment in my lifetime. To be honest, she’s mostly oblivious to that fact. I was always intrigued by the way the three girls in my old class responded to all that energy. One was a prima donna or right in the midst of the brawls, depending on what most suited her purposes. Another, who had only two elder sisters, looked at those boys as if they were aliens from another planet. The last one, very beautiful little Larissa, was the girl of every one of those boys’ dreams. They couldn’t be nice enough to her. She had no clue. But Emry has only a brother and all the cousins she knows are boys. It’s actually rare than she has a female playmate. And so, a classroom full of boys isn’t anything abnormal to her.
But for me, well, I’m not eighteen anymore. I spend one Sunday a month teaching Emry’s class and three Wednesdays a month in Cubbies with the same group of kids plus six or seven more. And it is exhausting! But, they are fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment