Don't Tell God We're Stopping At The Gas Station!

Martha commented after we all laughed at this comment made by our son Jeffrey after the whole family delivered the Minot Daily News on our last Sunday of the route that He would know it whether we told Him or not! Context: at the end of our route there's a local church with the sign "Don't tell God how big your storm is, tell the storm how big Your God is!"

Occasionally when Martha and I finish the paper route during the week -- we alternate days, but this getting up at four in the morning is wiping us out! -- we stop at a local gas station open 24 hours to grab a coffee and/or something to eat (since freshly made doughnuts come free with a coffee purchase, it's a great deal) and of course the kids know this.

Sometimes when they're on the route with us we'll offer to take them for a drink, and they often don't get coffee. Sarah will get chips, or Jeffrey will get hot chocolate, something that's essentially breakfast! So the church sign and Jeffrey asking me whether we could stop at the gas station since we'd finished the route and had a few hours before church got mashed together Sunday!

It was also our first day driving the route in (cue Price is Right announcer's voice) OUR BRAND NEW CAR! Ok, it's not that new; like the Hyundai Elantra we've been driving for years, it's also a 1999 model. It's a Chevy Lumina with power windows, power locks, and a working radio -- important as ours flat-lined two years ago -- that Martha found Friday on Trininet, her employer's classified ads site, for $1750.

We are so thankful to Martha's parents Robert and Sharon for helping us get it and we surprised the kids with it about an hour after I got off work; we at first told them it was Martha's sister Mary's (who with her pet cockatiel Sweetie stayed with us Friday night because the plumbing where she was staying got backed up; Sweetie's also been with us since then and Mary while on vacation has been alternating until the cleaner my brother-in-law's family had to use in the basement's smell goes down between our house and her parents') but then Sarah and Jeffrey bounded with excitement that it was ours -- we just have to get everything moved over there, a process which started this weekend.

Sunday morning was the last day for Sunday school classes at my church Bethany Lutheran until this fall. Karn our director asked me to sub for the teacher in Noah's Arkade on that day, and I had no problem with that, but the fifth graders I would have been teaching did -- but again, I had no problem with that. I'm surprised I got asked to teach a class again after an event a few weeks ago where one set of parents shouted down that I was too mean to teach, whatever that means.

Ok, it wasn't quite that dramatic, but if you feel the administration doesn't stick up for the teachers or declares discipline a lost cause because we have so few kids (we're in a 50,000 + town with dozens of churches) ... really, it's just a matter of time before we consider the whole program useless. Quite a few churches already do, it seems, if a page called "Killing Sunday School" [it used to end (Before It Kills The Church), now it concludes with "/Birthing Cross+Gen Worship"] is any indication.

I figure the name change made it more amenable because it's not enough to take out what you don't like, you have to replace it with something that's stronger. A seed has to die before it can bring forth life, to use one of Jesus' analogies. I don't have a problem with change but I do have a problem with -- what I think -- is their throwing out the baby with the bathwater philosophy. Same with homeschooling promos that essentially cast public school teachers as the devil's children, but now I REALLY digress. Put simply, if you're counting on one or two hours of Sunday school, church attendance, or any other faith reinforcement outside the home to keep you or your children going and growing in God, then you're missing it. I'm missing it. 

I need to fill up at the gas station, David