A Squared Plus B Squared...

I know you have been wondering how my gig as the head Sunday school teacher went. What? You weren't? You haven't been thinking about it all weekend?

Well, it went OK. I read through the lesson plan about fifty times Saturday night. This month the theme is parables, and this week's parable is the one where the woman loses a coin, searches her whole house, lights a lamp, sweeps the floor, finally finds it, then calls her friends and has a party. There are always art project type activities, and I went with the coin rubbing option (fun, right?) and didn't do any preparation for the alternative (the coin headband), because it involved glitter glue, which I don't have, and punching out the coins from the class materials, which I didn't have, because they're in the Sunday school room.

But the coin rubbing thing did NOT go well. The kids barely got circles out of their rubbings. They thought it was boring. And because I didn't get there early enough, I didn't get to punch out and assemble the other class materials. So the cute little booklet they normally get didn't go home with them.

On the plus side, the assistant brought excellent snack: slices of cheddar cheese, apple slices, and Ritz crackers. That took the kids a good long time to eat. The part where I read them the actual story, with coin counting went well. We sang a song with movements (lighting a lamp, sweeping a floor, finding the coin, calling our friends), then we all passed the coin around and whoever had it, we said their name and said they were important to God.

Of course, this is the kind of tricky part. The whole point of the coin story is that even though there are billions of people, when even one turns to God, or returns to God, there is celebration in Heaven. We are each that special to God. And this is a sticky point in my own admittedly shaky theology. This is not the space to untangle things, no doubt, and I don't feel weird telling three and four year olds that they are important to God. I don't know. It kind of reminded me of when I was substitute teacher in a math class and taught a bunch of high school students the pythagorean theorem. It wasn't my specialty, but we worked it out.

Happy Presidents Day!