Anticipation

Every Sunday morning I positively work up a sweat between the time that I sit down in the pew with my eldest to the time that she walks through those blessed doors to Children's Church just before the sermon starts.  I enter the sanctuary well-prepared.  Gum?  Check.  Peppermints?  Check.  The little children's worship sheets that take her all of five minutes to complete?  Check.  Stern warning to behave?  Check.  I sit down in the pew and quickly leaf through the bulletin to locate the spot where the exodus of children will occur.  And then I plot our survival to that point.

Now, I entered this new season of our lives with excitement.  My big girl loves to sing, and she knows a good number of praise songs that we sing in church.  She also knows far more hymns than your average four year old.  Surely this would be a sweet time of worshipping together and teaching my girl about corporate worship!  And at times it has been sweet.  But more often than not, my four-year-old is just a four-year-old trapped in an adult setting.

And bless her heart, she really tries to be good.  She can't help it that her bottom was made to squirm, or that, if we're not singing a song she knows and a baby's not being baptized, well, it just kinda bores her to death.

Throw into the mix the fact that I get up from the pew, enter the choir loft, and sing an anthem about halfway through the service while she's STILL IN THERE, and you have the potential for disaster.

And I'll go ahead and point out the obvious.  This is my oldest, my first Big Church attender.  My youngest will probably be hanging off the end of the pew upside down and I won't know or care, but every whisper this one makes just seems amplified in this first-time mommy's ears. 

A couple of weeks ago, I watched in horror from the choir loft as my baby loudly announced to me--from her seat in the pew, during a prayer, and with tears in her eyes--that the pencil she was using was bro-o-oken. Thank goodness for other mamas who are not afraid to pick up a child who is not their own with the assertive calm that makes them stop whimpering. 

But this morning, I was super-prepared.  I had lined up our small group leader to sit with H while I sang the choir anthem.  Things started off smoothly.  H and Miss Carol were singing their hearts out on the praise choruses, and we only had a couple of whisperings during the prayers about whether she could color on the prayer request cards.  I was even so confident that I entered the choir loft before the baby baptism.  H and Miss Carol watched the baptism with great interest, as it was a sweet family we know well. 

But when the baptism was over, the pastor said that children could be dismissed to Children's Church, and on the second pew a certain little girl shot up out of her seat, threw her arms into the air, and exclaimed with great relief, "YES!"

I couldn't have said it better myself.