Today, Christmas morning dawned and my family was not together. My oldest child is in the hospital with a serious injury. Yesterday, Christmas eve, I shuttled back and forth from the church to the hospital. At three in the afternoon my husband was at the hospital so that front was covered. The pageant was on the horizon. I decided that it would be harder to explain what needed to be done to get the pageant underway than it was to just show up and do it. I rushed home, threw on something red and went to the church for the pageant. Once I was at the church, I felt surrounded by love and support; everyone was so willing to provide assistance. It was a warm, comfortable place to be for a couple hours. The children were excited and happy and the parents were kind. The generosity of my friends and family at the church was a balm to my very worried soul.
It is sometimes hard for me to accept help. Last night I tried to hold tight to my responsibilities, but I realized, once the children were out of their costumes and back with their parents, that I needed to accept the gift my friends had given me, the freedom to go right back to the hospital and sit with my boy. It was a wonderful and generous gift, not many people want to sort and fold costumes, store risers, remove masking tape from the floor, or serve sandwiches on Christmas eve, but that is what my friends, my brothers and sisters in Christ did. I don’t know who did most of it, but I thank all of them, known and unknown.
Now that our son is being discharged this afternoon, albeit with many, many restrictions and conditions, I again feel thankful for God’s many blessings on this Christmas day. We will go home and be together and I will now let down my guard and weep and sleep and feel blessed to be physically surrounded by my immediate family and spiritually surrounded by my church family.
Merry Christmas,
Michelle
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Monday, December 06, 2010
Advent - Preparing your Children
Take your children to Sunday school. For 45 minutes each week your children can have a free lesson on the love of God and the history of the our faith tradition. They will play games and paint and glue. They will decorate cookies and make smoothies. They will dig in a sandbox and use more glitter than is necessary. As parents all you have to do is get them up, feed them breakfast and bring them to church. (You have to feed them breakfast no matter if you come to church or not so really it just means getting going on Sunday morning.) There are classes for adults, but if no adult classes catch your eye there is coffee and the newspaper.
Here at our church we now have Starbucks coffee, with all of the fixings - sugar, sweeteners, half and half, skim milk and flavorings. There are comfortable chairs in a lovely alcove just outside the children’s area where a parent can alight to relax or talk with other parents while their children are inside learning about the love of God. Soon we will have several Sunday papers to read as well.
Some children and teens come to Sunday school nearly every week. They don’t want to come every week, but their parents bring them anyway. It isn’t a child’s decision. It is a parent’s decision. Whether a child is raised attending church and Sunday school is the responsibility of the parents, like vitamins and potty training, not appreciated by the child at the time, but important none the less.
Parents should not abdicate their responsibility to whining, complaining children or sleepy, insolent teenagers. Teenagers are legendary for making bad choices and ill considered decisions. Don’t leave it up to them to go or not to go. Parents often make children do things they don’t want to do, learn to swim, bath, eat vegetables, do homework. Sunday school isn’t as bad as any of those things. Once they get there they will have fun most of the time and probably get some kind of unhealthy snack. They need to go to church and Sunday school. They need to learn the stories both old testament and new. They need to meet and know the people of their church, to be part of the church community.
I have a nephew whose parents have never taken him to church. His parents never had to argue about getting up on Sunday morning, about what is and is not acceptable to wear to church. They never had to hiss between their teeth dire warnings in an attempt to curb misbehavior during the service. They never had to tell him he could not spend the night at a friends house on Saturday night because there was church in the morning. Now he voices to his parents, in the presence of his grandparents, his disappointment that his parents never took him to church. The lesson here is that as a parent there is no winning the admiration of your teenagers in this regard; either they are mad because you made them go to church or they are mad because you didn’t make them go to church. If they are going to be mad either way then err on the side of them learning the golden rule and the Ten Commandments. Take them to church and Sunday school, start this advent and Christmas season. It’s a thankless job, but that’s part and parcel of being a parent.
Peace to all this season of preparation,
Michelle
Here at our church we now have Starbucks coffee, with all of the fixings - sugar, sweeteners, half and half, skim milk and flavorings. There are comfortable chairs in a lovely alcove just outside the children’s area where a parent can alight to relax or talk with other parents while their children are inside learning about the love of God. Soon we will have several Sunday papers to read as well.
Some children and teens come to Sunday school nearly every week. They don’t want to come every week, but their parents bring them anyway. It isn’t a child’s decision. It is a parent’s decision. Whether a child is raised attending church and Sunday school is the responsibility of the parents, like vitamins and potty training, not appreciated by the child at the time, but important none the less.
Parents should not abdicate their responsibility to whining, complaining children or sleepy, insolent teenagers. Teenagers are legendary for making bad choices and ill considered decisions. Don’t leave it up to them to go or not to go. Parents often make children do things they don’t want to do, learn to swim, bath, eat vegetables, do homework. Sunday school isn’t as bad as any of those things. Once they get there they will have fun most of the time and probably get some kind of unhealthy snack. They need to go to church and Sunday school. They need to learn the stories both old testament and new. They need to meet and know the people of their church, to be part of the church community.
I have a nephew whose parents have never taken him to church. His parents never had to argue about getting up on Sunday morning, about what is and is not acceptable to wear to church. They never had to hiss between their teeth dire warnings in an attempt to curb misbehavior during the service. They never had to tell him he could not spend the night at a friends house on Saturday night because there was church in the morning. Now he voices to his parents, in the presence of his grandparents, his disappointment that his parents never took him to church. The lesson here is that as a parent there is no winning the admiration of your teenagers in this regard; either they are mad because you made them go to church or they are mad because you didn’t make them go to church. If they are going to be mad either way then err on the side of them learning the golden rule and the Ten Commandments. Take them to church and Sunday school, start this advent and Christmas season. It’s a thankless job, but that’s part and parcel of being a parent.
Peace to all this season of preparation,
Michelle
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