Sunday Morning In The Seats

The first few weeks of summer our Sunday mornings run a little differently.

Our church takes a break in their children’s programming at both the beginning and the ending of summer.

I think it’s great for the faithful in-the-trenches-every-week kind of volunteers our church is blessed with.  They need a bit of breathing room as the school year finishes.  The timing is wise and thought out and I am glad it’s there.

This break from KidStuff requires us to change our family morning worship time.

Which we probably needed the kick in the pants to do anyway.

Normally we head to church together, ride in the car together, walk in the doors together and then we send the kids to their various color-coded age-appropriate rooms.

Kevin and I head to the group worship time and afterwards we pick up our five younger children from their classrooms carrying a varied assortment of the flotsam of a Sunday morning.

(Not that any of that is terrible.)

I appreciate our church’s children’s program and I think the powers that be who plan it are thoughtful, God-honoring men and women with a genuine intent to design activities and lessons to draw our kids closer to Jesus.

But I also think Sunday morning can be an incredible opportunity to worship together as a family.

An opportunity we do not attempt to conquer nearly often enough and seldom without some outside prodding.

So.

There we were – a few Sundays ago – sitting in a row of seats.  Seats we acquired at the last minute, or more accurately, after the last minute as we are frequently late.

The kids were particularly affectionate that morning.  Cuddling up to and around and on Kevin.  He looked over at me and mouthed the words, “They are IN my clothes.”

And that’s how it feels some days.

Every parent alive knows that feeling – the feeling of near suffocation from the very children you love more than anything in the world.  As if they are literally trying to draw your breath into their own.

A crayon fell through the seat crack.  Some child’s whisper is louder than the sermon it seems.

Some well-meaning adult had given Bergen lollipops to share.  Lollipops that end as sticky wet gross white pokers that require an immediate trash receptacle.

Two balloons – given by another adult (I have to question the well-meaningness of that adult) – were floating around my ankles and I found that my greatest fear was not the loud whispers or the lollipops any longer but was instead an accidental balloon pop mid-sermon.

And, for the love, have I not had six children??  What on earth was I thinking when I failed to confiscate the aforementioned balloons before entering the sanctuary?

And yet.

And yet.

There’s the truth of all this chaos.

The truth of these kids all over us, crawling across our flesh.

(Because they like us.  They know us.  We are safety to them.)

The crayons.  The whispers.  The scratching pen drawings.  The page turning loudness.  The self-conscious awareness of the person behind you scrutinizing your parenting over your shoulder.

There’s all that.

And then.

There’s this too.

The quiet lean-onto-my-shoulder from a ten-year-old who volunteers less hugs of late.

The sideways grins from a first grader when the pastor expresses something of which we’ve once discussed and it’s as if we share some inside joke together.

And then – the kids – singing.

Bergen, a quiet fellow in large groups.  His clear nine-year-old boy voice – bold and young and unafraid and unfettered by fear of impressions or listening ears.

And his voice lifted itself to the air and I floated up there with those words,

beaming and pure

and I was able to see a glimpse of the sweetness in shared song.

Words uplifted and sung in praise.

The best reason to sit in a service beside your child.

To see what they see and hear what they hear and to experience worship together, in a community, as a family.

Yes.

That’s worth the lollipop sticks wrapped in the sermon notes in the bottom of my bag.