K, so I teach 6 year olds in church every Sunday. 6 of them. And they are fabulous and crazy! Especially heavy on the crazy side today. More like WILD!
The twins kept sticking out their tongues and touching them to each other's, and Luke kept sliding his chair to the back of the room and then secretly escaping out the door. Bekah sobbed for a full hour and fifteen minutes because, in her own words, "Nobody cares about me." Drey flipped his suit coat over his head and huddled with Luke in the back of the room, stopping occasionally to act "reverent" so he might get chosen to pick a leaf off the Autumn Tree full of song titles.
Mason leaned over to me while we were singing and I was trying to comfort Bekah and said "What's a sdew?" "A stew?" I responded, "like...to eat?" "No, a SDEW! What's a SDEW?" I sat there trying to figure out where in the world that question came from when I realized we were singing the song "I Am A Child of God", wherein you will find the lyric..."teach me all that I must do....to live with Him someday." I pulled him in with my one free arm, the other being used to stroke Bekah's shoulder, and whispered, "It's MUST DO, buddy." "Oh," he said.
So then we got to class where I was going to teach about the Last Supper and we were going to pretend. Bekah was so upset I decided we all needed to just have a talk for a minute. So Bekah explained her feelings to the whole class, and Madi apologized for socking her in the tummy and Sophie said she was sorry for pulling the "hairs" out of her fake mink stoll, even though she said it was only just a few teeny little ones. And then I started to talk about bread and how there's a lot of times in scriptures where there is bread. I talked about the Jews and the unleavened bread of their escape from Egypt, and I told how Jewish people believed in the Hebrew religion like we believe in the Mormon religion and Sophie, one of the twins, said..."Madi HATES church". Madi, meanwhile, is over in the corner sliding the window open and shut, and I said, "Tell me about that Madi" and she said; "Yup, I HATE church!" "What is it that you don't like?" I asked. "It's TOO LONG!" (Tell me about it, I thought, you try reigning in six year olds for two hours) What I said was, "You know what,? It IS too long!" "Yeah", chimed in Soph, "It lasts the WHOLE DAY!" "You know," I said, "You are right. Church IS long! It's probably the wrong church, huh?" Mason looked at me in disbelief, almost shaking his head to clear his ears. After a half a minute I said "Actually, guys, it's not wrong. It's the right place to be on Sunday. And sometimes we do the hard things because they are the right things."
By the end of our lesson we had draped our heads like apostles. I had pretended to be Jesus and had washed their beautiful little feet, which fit perfectly in one of my pie tins. We had sung a hymn, just like the apostles had done with Jesus in the upper room. Bekah had filled my Bennion Pottery pitcher with water from the drinking fountain and we had broken bread and sipped water at our own pretend Last Supper. She whispered to me, "Can we do it (sniff) again?" But the halls were full of people and moms and dads were waiting outside for us to finish, so instead Madi said a prayer and this is what she said:
Heavenly Father. Thank you for church. And thank you that we could pretend. And please bless Bekah
to feel not sad. And thank you for her, and for Mason
and Sophie
and Dreyden
and Luke
And mostly thank you for Jesus."