Scenes of Sunday

I have lived at church the last three days, as I always do at the start of a new Sunday school year. There isn’t any other way around it. Every year Matt is frustrated and mad at me for having such a huge task to do in such a short time, but there’s really no way to do it before that moment. Rooms are needed all summer. The stuff has to sit there until it’s needed. Of course I could have done plenty more mending and painting earlier. But I didn’t. And on that note I want to commend all Matt’s sermons on I Corinthians up to this point. They’re all excellent. He tops himself every week. But this week he kept mentioning “Sunday School Teachers” so that after a while I felt that perhaps he was speaking also to me. Anyway, the whole part about weakness being a feature not a bug, but that that is by no means a reason to slack off, and that we are judged by our labor and not by the fruits thereof, hit me like a punch from Ray Rice, but in a good way….that was probably in poor taste. Cough. Sorry.

Where was I. Oh yes. So every year I post these same pictures in the hope that some of you far flung readers will move to Binghamton with some children and bring them here, and so that you who live in Binghamton will do the difficult traumatizing thing of waking up early and getting here at the crack of dawn. Sunday school, tragically, starts at 9:15. As you are struggling and weeping with your small child early on a Sunday morning, when the whole world is snuggled still deep in their beds, try to remember Jesus, hung out there in the sky, naked and bleeding, for you, and soldier on. As I’ve been saying to Alouicious, whenever he points out some unfair selfless act he has been forced to undertake, “Jesus appreciates your sacrifice.”

These pictures were snapped hurriedly in the moments after I over used and broke my own coffee grinder because of having forgotten to pick up good ground coffee for the Christian Ed hour, and when all the children came blustering and shouting in to demand a gummy bear. If you come on time, you get a gummy bear. This room, for the first time, we are calling The Pasture. The rooms need names. Referring to them by the Three to Six Year Old Atrium is becoming burdensome and irritating.A total rearrange, some new shelves, getting rid of the tippy leaven tray, redoing some old worn posters, and just a general dusting and brightening and feshning of everything.Oh, and a new shell, because the old one was chipped and then broken in all my disoganized chaos. The children didn’t break it, I did, because, you know, I’m a clutz.

And this is The Vineyard.

Not a great picture, but a full and interesting room. I’m going to get someone to paint a vine going up the wall in the corner. Soon. Hopefully very soon. Because no one has anything better to do for sure. Do really need some art and visual something, but in the meantime, it’s restful to have some blank walls and clear space.Finally got some boxes for the shepherds and for the Annunciation. They’ve been tipping around on a tray while I looked for suitable housing which I discovered, finally, at ACMoore, praise The Lord. Need to go back and get one more and then I will definitely need more shelves.

And here, last of all, is The Tabernacle. Again, very blank and spare, but there’s going to be a vast timeline and some other things coming in soon, like more shelves as I need them.

I love this rug so much, and this room. It is more and more a trauma to me that I can’t be in every room at once. I feel like Owl, shouting at himself from the top of the stairs and the bottom of the stairs, and finally sitting down on the center stair in sorrow. Every age is so interesting, there are so many beautiful materials and lessons.

Of course, I was running crazy and there were all kinds of inconvenient stupidities that played themselves out. Like me moving the youth fridge back to the youth room but neglecting to plug it in so that I had lots of water to clean up suddenly. Bizarrely, I did have time to take a picture of it. An uninteresting picture of a towel on the floor. And because of the water and the coffee traumas, I didn’t have time to finish mending the books of the bible box which I had laboriously carried to the kitchen where I could sling hot glue about, if everything had gone as I intended, which it did not. The fact that I had Three Months to mend the books of the bible box weighed heavily upon me all morning and I felt terrible about it.

I plunked it down and was about to run back but found the little girls arranging cookies on platters for coffee hour. Gladys posed, reflexively as it were.

Happy to report that they all three are the picture of health and their hands were scrubbed clean, and they were being closely monitored so as not to be licking the cookies or anything, before arranging them. Not that they would ever do that.

So, along with the books of the bible, I have to also get polishing together

and face down the big pile of junk I shoved in the back closet and fled from, because I just couldn’t face it on a Saturday night when I had three little girls’ fingernails to polish, the internet to serf, and the end of Pirates of the Carribean II to catch which music, don’t judge me, I really love.