Second Church Steps

Butterfly Days The Children's Circle Preschool year end rituals are among the things that I have missed the most in these difficult days of sheltering at home.   One of my favorites involves butterflies and waiting.   Classrooms of children watch for butterflies to open –in their classroom!   It is a momentous occasion.   We pray with the teachers that the butterflies will emerge.   We watch and wait with the impatient children.   The children learn words of waiting, hope, and anticipation to go with those feelings. The butterfly is also a metaphor for the impending end of the school year, when the children will go forth to new places, new people, and new experiences…taking their early learning and stories of becoming with them. Then, it struck me that these are butterfly days , and how we talk about them with and NEAR our children matters. Words matter, and stories are memory forming. Parents, we are all aware, acutely aware, of the diff...

Here's to Christmas Pageants!  Years ago, okay decades ago, I lived in Crawfordsville, and they had an epic one.      You see, the church let the YOUTH GROUP tell the Christmas story.   We all know that can be a little risky.  It was not told in King James English, or even NRSV.   I didn’t get to see it;  I was in Sunday School. Still, I treasure two memories from that event; yes, they are memories of an event I did not see and yet became part of our family Advent Lore. It changed the way I wait. First memory, the kings arrived down the center aisle on bicycles, and second the shepherds’ big line was, “’Biding’s a bore.”  Any time I have to wait, I repeat that line.  The shepherds are SO RIGHT!  “And in the same country there were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8 KJV). They were waiting.  Shortly after that, Christmas Pageants disappeared from the chur...