The Value of Children's Ministry

Last night I had a children’s ministry meeting at church. It was probably the liveliest meeting I have ever attended. Jessica, the leader of the elementary classes, was in rare form. Already a lively bundle of energy, she kept us all in stitches with stories of the kids and crazy ideas she could incorporate. When Will, the pastor of family ministries, remarked that this was the best meeting he ever got to attend, Jessica responded, “Of course it is! We don’t bring food…and how many calories have we laughed off tonight?” 

 

But in the midst of all the fellowship and laughter, we also got a great deal of business accomplished. It’s been quite a ride since I came on the team as head of the three-year-old class (which is currently combined with the four-year-old class mostly because we don’t have enough teachers or helpers anymore to have two classes, but I don’t particularly mind because I love working with Cammie who is head of the four-year-old class). Coming out of COVID, we had all kinds of serious conversations about masks, volunteer requirements, social distancing, and the very sad reality that half the helpers on our rosters have used COVID as an excuse to simply not be a part of the team anymore. But the other half has been wonderfully faithful and pulled more than their share of the load, giving us great cause to laugh and rejoice at the ministry that has continued for our kids. 

 

One of our “homework” assignments for our next meeting in August was to come up with an response to “We Value Children’s Ministry Because…”. We especially want to hone in on this for two reasons: 1) our church spends a lot of time and energy focused on the international students Purdue brings to our area until it seems like everything exciting is to be had from Chinese teenagers while our growing kids in the basement (where the children’s classrooms are located) get forgotten, and 2) with COVID restrictions behind us and kids returning with their families, we reallywant to bolster some much needed help!

 

That night after the kids were in bed, I had put all sorts of things away, worked at some project for work, and finally tucked myself in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about why I personally value children’s ministry and spend so much time involved in it. I quickly noted four things on my phone:

 

·      I value what Christ values and Christ values children.

·     They are both the present and the future of the Church.

·      I should never despise youth.

·     Their great faith encourages me and reminds me of what my faith should be.

 

In some ways, it’s hard to put into words why I value children’s ministry so much even to the point of wanting to put the Chinese students in the basement where they’ll be forgotten. Maybe it’s because children do often get overlooked. Children are abundant and everywhere. To the point that even the ones screaming in the middle of the grocery store gets overlooked while we frown at the parents who can’t control their child. When parents brought their children to see Jesus, the disciples felt the same way. In essence, they felt that children exist but aren’t important until they grow up and can have a reasonable conversation with Jesus. But Jesus felt just the opposite. Children are the key to faith, probably for the very fact that they aren’t reasonable. They simply know and accept. If Jesus says something, they don’t need to be reasoned into the believing it: they just accept it because Jesus said so. Sometimes whether it makes sense or not. So while adults upstairs are reasoning with teenage Chinese students in hopes that faith will take hold, we’re downstairs sharing the gospel with a hundred kids who believe the Word because it’s in the Bible and Jesus doesn’t lie. We are building a foundation so when these kids are teenagers and the world throws all kinds of awful things at them, they already know what is true and their faith will triumph. No reasoning necessary.

 

Yes, the above is very simplistic. Not all of these kids will know Christ as their Savior. Some will disown everything they’ve learned and go walking in their way once they grow up. But even if they totally deny everything they were taught, they won’t ever escape the Truth that is present somewhere in their childhood memories. A Truth that may one day when they face the reality of this world germinate into the faith they once had as a child. 

And that is why I value children’s ministry.

Oh, the Places I have Lived! - Part 4

Honestly, this picture looks like it comes out of some book from the 1930s that would go on to talk about how my grandparents lived in their little home with no air conditioning, spending their evenings on the porch over a game of checkers as they swatted flies. The poorer history of the post-Civil-War-South. A page of a history book.

 

 

But, actually, that picture was taken in 1985 and I think that’s me waving from the porch. The house belonged to my great-grandfather, affectionately known as “Daddy Bert”, who had passed away a month after I was born. The little four-room, one bath and a hall where doorways converged still belonged to the family and we lived there for about six months after we moved to Tennessee while my parents looked for a house. I don’t know when it was built, but I don’t think my grandmother grew up there, so sometime after she married in the 50s. The bathroom was not original to the house. As my great-grandfather got older, my grandmother and her brother finally convinced him that a bathroom inside would be safer than going to the outhouse. But to me it looked ancient because it had a clawfoot bathtub. My memories of the house are few but colorful: our dog Fred getting badly hit by a car, the neighbor across the street taking me on a horseback ride around the house, the closet that we could walk through to my parents’ bedroom, the bugs that covered the kitchen floor once, the cicadas that plagued us for probably a week or two but I’m pretty sure it was a whole year, casting our fishing rods from the porch, a huge and deadly snake my dad found when removing an old tire from the backyard, and my cat Desi letting herself in and out of the house by climbing the front screen door and maneuvering it far enough that she could drop through to the other side. The things I don’t remember are no air conditioning during a Tennessee summer (we lived there from March and into August) although I do remember a lot of time at the pool, and the rabid fox we were warned about so my dad tried to teach my mom to shoot his gun. She can’t hit the broad side of a barn, though, so he put a hoe by the door in case she needed to protect herself and us girls.

 

In August, before I started Kindergarten, we moved into what we’ve since called “the rock house”. It's hard to tell in this picture, but the whole facade of the house was grey rocks:

 

 

Sadly, this house is no longer there. A couple of years after we moved in, an elementary school was built up the hill behind us (I would start third grade there). Before we moved, the school board wanted a right-of-way from us so they could use part of the property as a bus entrance/exit. Since we were moving, we told them to ask the next set of owners. I’m not sure what the decision was, but the last time I saw the house there was said entrance/exit in place. I think the story is the school eventually wanted all the land, got it, and tore the house down. I still haven’t figured out why.

 

Anyhow, I lived in this house on Franklin Road for over three years, which held the record until we moved in Londonderry, New Hampshire when I was twenty. I would start Kindergarten, learn to ride a bike, have sleepovers, have two siblings (Daniel and Sally) join our family, and generally just enjoy the ages of five to eight. As you can see, the house was a Cape Cod-ish kind of house. Katey and I had the whole upstairs to ourselves. On one side was our bed, dresser and closet for our clothes. One of eaves under the window was there, which made a good play area. The other side was our playroom, gymnasium, kitchen, library, classroom, art room…whatever game we were in the midst of. We had our toy kitchen and table set up on one end behind some of the supporting beams where we got into trouble mixing perfume, powder, water, and fingernail polish. When we first moved in, there was another eave we could play in but my parents had a second bathroom put in where that was. The rest of the room was where we made huge messes and got into big fights when Mom told us to clean them up.

 

The stairs from our rooms led were enclosed and led straight into the kitchen. The downstairs went around in a great circle, which was tons of fun as we could chase each other. Facing the house, on the right were the two bedrooms (my parents and our younger siblings) with a bathroom between and all of them led into a hall space where I would stand on my head because the walls were empty of furniture. The front of the house was the living area and the dining room was to the left between it and the kitchen in the back. There was a real fireplace and it always felt like we had plenty of space. Of course, I was a kid, so everything seemed big. Including the yard.

 

Today I’m not sure that yard was as huge as I remember, although the property itself was at least a few acres. We had a field to the side and behind us we didn’t play in. There had once been some outbuildings in those fields, and where the old barn had been is where we put our garden. The front yard was a good size, the house a distance back from the busy street. The backyard was fenced in with a chain-link fence and seemed huge as we played kickball on one end and had our swingset on the other. It sloped downhill and our favorite game was throwing pretend coconut bombs from the copse of trees on the top down on the “pirates” running up the hill just like in Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson.I think the rule was we had to stay within the fence, although it was okay if I jumped it get a ball we kicked over into the field. And that didn’t always stop Katey from scampering over to Mrs. Mayberry’s next door. She really was a great neighbor. 

 

In a lot of ways, I consider that rock house my “childhood home” even though I was only eight when we moved away. But it was such a fun place to live, and I have a lot of good memories. Besides, Tennessee is where my family has lived since the 1770s. It’s home.

Moms

I don’t have social media unless you count this blog and Pinterest, so I’m a little unaware of what is hashtagging, tiktoking, going viral…whatever. But, apparently, some time last year a picture of a mom working on her laptop in her bathtub while her very young toddler played at the water table set up in the bathroom went viral. Her point was how unfair COVID was making life on working moms: here she was working in her bathtub and having to watch her toddler at the same time. I’m still trying to figure out why in the world the bathtub was the best place for to set up her “office”.

 

This has been a running current through all the other “crises” of COVID. While business owners are being put out of business, some people really are dying, the government is creating cash out of thin air, and the dominoes are going to start falling fast and furious – working mothers are whining and complaining that they are being forced out of their jobs because now they have to be home taking care of their kids. What is going to happen to women in the workforce? This is harassment! Women are never treated fairly! Can you hear the violins?

 

The article I skimmed that wanted to bring this bathtub mom back as a poster child quoted a woman who has a whole organization set up called “The Marshall Plan for Moms”. A quick google search and skim-read of what pops up will give you the essence of what this group is after. Basically, working mothers should be paid every month for their “unseen, unpaid labor”.

 

For those of you who may be a bit rusty on your history, the Marshall Plan (named for Senator George Marshall who spearheaded it), chunked out more than $15 billion of United States money to Western Europe after World War II in order to help them “recover” from the War. In essence, its real purpose wasn’t recovery at all. The main goal was to keep Russia (and, so, Communism) at bay while making America a world power with lots of war-torn countries indebted to it. Even the most basic grasp of history will tell you it didn’t stop Communism from spreading. And why did America need to be a world power, anyhow? Most American history books paint the Marshall Plan as one of America’s greatest moments. As a follower of the Roosevelt “walk softly and carry a big stick” idea, we would have been much better off taking that $15 billion, investing it in our own country, and minding our own business.

 

The Marshall Plan for Moms has been around for a while, but it’s taking on new momentum by using the catch phrase “recovery”. They’re pushing the agenda that working moms need more “recovery” than, say, business owners in Minneapolis whose entire stores and inventories were burned down by BLM riots. Working moms need to be paid for all the work they do at home as well as all the work they are doing at work while they are paying for someone else to take care of their kids. Am I the only one who sees the irony in the sentence I just wrote?

 

The whole idea wreaks with irony. What about moms who don’t work? Those moms work just as hard (if not harder) being at home 24/7 with their kids. They don’t get paid vacations, or sick days, or health benefits in any way, shape, or form. Many of them homeschool their kids on top of “just” being mom, and they don’t even have a teacher’s union to back them up. Is there a Marshall Plan for them? Or do they not matter because they’re not “contributing” to the world?

 

Now I realize there are a lot of single moms out there who have to work. They don’t have a husband or trust fund that allows them to stay at home with their kids 24/7. There are even married moms who have to work for one reason or another. But for moms who are working on their laptops in the bathtub: you chose to do that. You chose to have kids. You chose to have a job. You chose to set up your office in the bathtub for some unknown reason. And like all of us, you have to live with those choices. If you don’t like it, give up the job. Put the children up for adoption. Buy a desk to work at. Whatever. But you know what you get paid for, and you know what you don’t get paid for. And you chose to do both. So, stop whining and complaining about the choices you made and man up. I’m sorry: woman up. Or, really, just shut up.

 

And now my mom is going to scold me for even saying that. My mom who raised eight kids, moving every two years, and homeschooled them and NEVER got a dime for any of it. No vacations, no sick days, and I’m not even sure when she slept. (After all, I don’t get much sleep with only three.) But while I’m sure there were moments, I never heard her whine, complain, or demand at least minimum wage. And now she’s at my house, watching my three little rascals so I can attend a meeting, or taking them shopping, or buying them lunch for a picnic and play time at the park. She drives hours to spend time with my nephew, and she would do the same for my other nephews if they didn’t live sixteen hours away. I have heard the I’m-getting-too-old-for-this phrase, but she is justified in saying that at this point of life. And, still, it doesn’t stop her.

 

So, woman in the bathtub and others like her, maybe you should stop Instagram-ming stupid pictures and contemplate all the women who have come before us. Those women who crossed the prairie in wagons, raised kids in houses with no plumbing or electricity, plowed fields right alongside their husbands with a baby on their back, and some who had no choice but to slave in cotton fields. They did it all with no lobbyist groups, no hashtagging their griefs for the world to see, and no payments for their labor. In fact, they never even thought of such a thing. Because they were women and they shouldered the responsibilities of being women. Maybe you should try being a woman, too.

11 Months!!!!

It is hard to believe Ellyson will soon be a whole year old. That a year ago, I felt like a beached whale and prayed she would arrive early. And just look at her now!

 

I don’t know whether to say she is more trouble than Ethan or my memory is very short-term. But I can say with all honesty she is more trouble with Emry. After all Emry didn’t crawl until after she turned one. And when she could crawl, she didn’t get into anything. Ellyson? My house constantly looks like a tornado started at one end and stormed through to the other. Magnatiles, markers, her own toys, my books, even things that have been missing for several days. All of them. Everywhere. Nothing is safe.

 

But continual disasters aside, Ellyson is a smart little thing. In the last week, I have noticed that not only can she take the cap off most markers (which she always finds because Emry always forgets to pick up at least one of them), but she immediately turns it in her hand and tries to put the cap on the end. And she can do it, too, except she doesn’t have enough dexterity to snap it into place. I guess she has watched Emry and Ethan use markers for most of her life since Emry draws like the world is running out of artwork. I’m still a bit amazed, though, that her motor skills are already that fine.

 

She has added several words to her vocabulary, but the primary one is “hot”. She learned this one when Ed was firing up the grill one day. However, she had has taken it to mean anything that is potentially dangerous or she shouldn’t be into (although that doesn’t always stop her). So, Legos are “hot”, outlets are “hot”, and the inside of the refrigerator is also “hot”.

 

I’ve learned that she will happily suck either of her thumbs. She loves Jim Brickman (a pianist). She can clap her hands. She adoresbeing outside, and she relaxes happily whenever she is placed in the tag-along to go on a bike ride. She also loves to “talk” and “giggle” with Emry both when they should be going to bed and in the morning when Emry will crawl into bed with her. In both cases, she is the instigator. Because she certainly knows how to get her way: grunt, yell, giggle, wave, cuddle. Isn’t it amazing how quickly they learn some things?

Looking at the sticker….

 

Taking off the sticker….

 

Finally – one with the sticker in place!

Oh, the Places I have Lived! - Part 3

I asked my mom in recent years how they came to build the house in Corinth. After about 38 years, the details are a little fuzzy, but basically it was just the right person talked to them, it was the right time, the right place and everything happened. Since building has been something we’ve considered, I wish all those pieces would fall in place for us…

 

The house on Wildwood Drive in Corinth is the first house I really remember, but I have lived there twice. And I’ve visited it more times than I can remember. I have a lot of good memories of that house and some hard ones, too. But that’s what a home is, right?

 

I don’t remember my parents building the house or even moving in, but I do remember watching TV in the living room, pretending to be Mary Lou Retton on the swingset in the backyard, playing in the rain with Katey and Fred (the dog) on the driveway, playing in my bedroom, spilling Kool Aid in the kitchen. (I wasn’t even supposed to be pouring Kool Aid and Grandpa shouldn’t have been sleeping when he was supposed to be watching Katey, myself and our friends Aaron, Ryan and Audra while our parents were out; but we were thirsty…and there were clean cups in the dishwasher…and I was FIVE years old…and you get the picture.) I also remember the day we moved out and how much room there was to turn cartwheels in the living room.

 

Later I remembered sleeping in our sleeping bags in the living room, Christmas celebrations, my aunt’s wedding, playing games with my cousins, Sunday lunches, Easter egg hunts, hanging out in the backyard with all my cousins at our grandparent’s 50^thWedding Anniversary, and being momentarily surprised that my cousin didn’t know my parents had built that house and I had lived there until I was five. But, then, why would she? She hadn’t even been born yet. The only way she knew that house was as Grandpa and Grandma’s house. For that matter, it’s the only way six of my siblings knew it, and I’m not sure even Katey remembers living there as she was only two when we left.

 

My parents built the house in Corinth, a tiny town northwest of Dallas, thinking that would be their “forever” home. “Forever” ended up being around two years. At the time they decided to move back to Tennessee, my paternal grandparents (who were living in Iowa) decided to move to Texas. They were going through a hard time, so my parents first rented the house to them and they later bought it. That was in 1985. My grandmother would pass away in 2008, and my grandfather sold the house in 2014. I was a little sad to see it go.

 

For the most part, the house remained unchanged from when my parents built it. My grandparents did knock out the wall of the fourth bedroom to extend the living area sometime before I was in my teens. Some updates were done to the kitchen, bathrooms, and dining area. My grandmother planted so many trees it was a family joke that they lived in the “Texas forest”. The red, blue, white and yellow plaid-ish wallpaper remained on the wall of what had been my bedroom but became an office until I was in my 20s. Then my grandmother, who was colorblind, had a late-life crisis and repainted every room except the kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms in Big Bird Yellow, Fire Truck Red, and Electric Powder Blue. It was a little over the top, but she literally could not see that. And it just seemed to add to the quirks of her hundreds of figurines, plate collection on the wall, and cast iron old fashioned iron collection that sat around the television. 

 

In 2009, when I moved back to Texas, I moved back into that house for thirteen months. I lived in what had been Katey’s bedroom, cooked in the kitchen I knew so well, and cleaned a house I had probably helped clean when I was five. All in all, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the house, working every day and filling my off hours with other activities. But I did successfully cook my first Thanksgiving turkey there, I had fun getting to know my youngest cousin (who is over 20 years younger than I and lives not too far) on several occasions, and it was rather fun (at first) to live in the same place I had lived 25 years before. 

 

Even though that house was not an “ancestral” home by any means, I learned a lot about my family in that home. When I was fifteen and spent a month one summer with my grandparents, my grandmother dug out old family slides, the projector, and a sheet. We went through boxes of old black-and-white photos while they told stories. When we lived in Texas again when I was in my teens, we went over one afternoon to meet Grandpa’s first cousin – a man he had never even met although they grew up in the same town because their fathers (brothers) and fought and never spoke to each other. At their 50^thwedding anniversary, Grandma dug out all kinds of old photo albums and scrapbooks which I spent hours pouring over at the dining room table, learning all kinds of things I had never known about my family. And when I lived with Grandpa, he told me things about when he was first married, and a lot of the trials the Lord put him through.

 

Every place I have lived is full of memories, but that house more than most since I spent so much time there on so many different occasions. It really is sad that it’s no longer in the family.

Wildwood Drive, Corinth, Texas - circa 1985 

The house doesn't look very different today, but the landscape does!