Simple

T-shirts. Flip flops. Not every day, but inching closer.

When it drops to 60 degrees and windy, the kids curl into their sweatshirts and ask me for gloves on the playground. We're more than ready for spring to give way to summer.

Haiti letters are out and on their way to students. There's a count down in the workroom marking the number of days left of school. We've started talking about camp, and the eighth graders are uncertainly clinging to their last few weeks of middle school.

We'll capture them three Sundays from now for their first taste of the high school youth group, and then they'll move up in June. It's a smaller class than last year, more watchful, less quick to engage. Different, like every class is different from the one before it. As if there is a collective refusal to mimic too closely.

And, it means that my sixth graders are moving up too. A few more weeks and they'll be displaced, no longer the babies who can get away with anything. Although, these kids have never done church the 'normal' way, so who knows what next year will hold.

They're growing older, but they're also becoming more sure of the fact that they belong here.

M*tt** allows me to comb my fingers through the snarls in the back of his shaggy hair, and, when J*yd*n questions it with a teasing, "What are you, his mother?" he simply shrugs and leans back into the touch, even as I ruffle J*yd*n's hair with my other hand. "The seat of his car messed with the back of his head." I explain, turning a little to watch M*t** and Ry*n in the octagon, and M*tt** nods. "The back of my hair is always messed up."

To his mind, it is simple.

We go outside for the game, and M*t** throws his shoulder into my back until I chase him, until we're both on the grass, both laughing, and he's ready to join back in.

Inside, J*yd*n is glued to my arm, so close that he's stepping on the edges of my shoes every time that he turns, stomping lightly on my toes during prayer.

The girls are on my left side as we sit, knee to knee, crammed in as close as they can get, dutifully working to lock me out my phone. Laughing and rolling their eyes as we jump around during music, only J*yd*n having followed closely enough to be standing with us.

*nn*'s hands are everywhere, her still forming sense of mimicry landing them in the boys' hair split seconds after mine, the unexpected action earning her their befuddled stares.

M*tt** drifts closer after a single song, letting me drape a heavy arm around his neck and pull him forwards. He shouts at all the quiet parts, craning his neck around to look at me, daring my hand to cover his mouth, to turn his head towards the screen, to just hold on until his twelve year old world stops spinning and he can remember that church is a place to feel safe.

M*dd** has her hands raised at the last song, and even my shouting one almost stills, always aware of when a moment is sacred.

They settle in for the lesson, and the rest of the boys make their way from the front, carving out barely enough space to sit, clustered together like a pack of puppies, asking questions and making comments and trying not to wiggle - because, quite honestly, they haven't left any of us the room to do so. 

I bribe them with donuts, just this once, and their eyes light up with memories. "We should all get together this summer," M*t** proclaims, "and have another donut fight!"

And, I am reminded that, just like the coming spring, this is a process. It's a messy, beautiful process. Never smooth. Never following a 'normal' set of rules. But, these are my kids, and we have rarely done normal. It is simply not in their natures, nor in mine.

So, we run and we chase and we hold on. We sit 'too close' together and everyone talks at once. We eat donuts and answer questions and tell stories. And, when *nn* interrupts the prayer at the end of breakout groups with, "Do you guys think I'm autistic?" the girls who have been with me since elementary school barely even blink.

This is our normal.

And, just like the weather, we'll enjoy what we have while it lasts.

Your Turn: God's Story

This week, our last week of class, I want to tell you one final story. Actually, it's all the same story as what we've been reading every week. It's a story that is God's story. And, it's a story that we get to be a part of too.

Do you remember, way back in the beginning, when we talked about Eve and Adam? We read about how God put His breath in them and made them in His image, made them to be a picture of God.

We read about Abraham and Sarah and how God promised to use them to bless the whole world. We read about how God wants the whole world to know about how big and how good God is. And, eventually, we got to Jesus.

We read about the way that Jesus took care of people on earth, and we even read a little bit about why Jesus lets bad things happen. We read about how Jesus gave His followers a big job to do, the same job that God gave to Sarah and Abraham and Adam and Eve. And, we read about how Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to help finish that job.

There were lots of stories about people who trusted the Holy Spirit to help them to be brave and patient and kind, stories about people who lived a long time ago and stories about people like the Granberrys who are still alive today, working to tell people about how big and how good God is.

There were even weeks where we read stories about big words, like “incarnational” and “ecclesia.” Over the last fifteen weeks, we have read a lot of stories!...

Download a PDF of the entire story with activity pages here.

Planting: God's Story

Over the last couple of weeks, we have read a lot about a very specific part of God's story. We've read about how God's people are supposed to live like the people they are living with. We've read about how they are supposed to trust the Holy Spirit to help them be brave and patient and kind.

Last week, we even spent our whole time reading just about Church.

There's a reason for all of that. There are people who study God's story for a job. Instead of learning to be engineers or farmers or teachers, they went to school to learn how to be a theologian. Those theologians have a name for the time that we are living in right now. Actually, it's a name for the whole time between the book of Acts and the time when Jesus comes back.

They call it the church age.

Now, that's just a fancy way of saying that Jesus is in heaven right now, and that He left His people, the Church, here on earth to keep telling his story. And, well, it would be hard to talk about the “church age” if we didn't know what the Church was.

But, for this week, I want to tell you a different story, one about two specific people named Chris and Mary, who had to practice being incarnational and let the Holy Spirit teach them how to start a church in a place that was very different from where they used to live...

Download a PDF of the entire story with activity pages here.

Ecclesia: God's Story

Do you know what the word ecclesia means? I'll give you a hint. It's an old greek word, and it's one that Jesus' friends used a lot after He went back to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to be their helper. 

Tell me some crazy guesses, and we'll see if anyone gets close.

Well, those are some pretty interesting guesses. You guys are very creative. But, the word ecclesia just means 'gathering.' Back before Jesus, it meant a gathering of citizens, a gathering of the people who belonged to that city or to that country. When people who belonged to a certain place got together, they called it ecclesia.

Jesus' followers took over that word, and they used it to talk about a gathering of the people who belonged to the Kingdom of God. Now, who are the people who belong to the Kingdom of God? 

Exactly. Christians, or people who follow Jesus, people who help to tell God's story. Ecclesia came to mean a gathering of Christians. Gathering means to get together, so, what might be an English word for Christians all getting together?

 You're right. Jesus' first followers used the word ecclesia. We use the word church. Church is God's people getting together. Church is Jesus' followers gathering in one place. That seems pretty simple. It is simple, but it is also important in a couple of ways...

Download a PDF of the entire story with activity pages here.

Between

Easter. Regrowth.

The day itself is weeks past, but I can still feel the echoes of this season in my kids.

Easter breaks the pattern that their lives have taken on. The resurrection bursts into the beginning of the week and changes everything with a single massive miracle. 

(Forty days after resurrection, the ascension rocks the world of Christ's followers once again, and they stand, dumbfounded, waiting for Jesus to walk through yet another wall and make physical on his promise to never leave.)

We're halfway between between the two dates now, and I can feel the kids holding on, the way that the disciples must have, trying to get a grip on this newest form of reality, anxious for the changes that must be coming next.

Because, these patterns ripple through our lives as well.

We dust off old habits and ways of being, and green leaves spring out of things that looked like they were dead. Rebirth. Regrowth.

For the first time in ten months, they start to verbally question why things are no longer the way that they used to be, as if Holy Week shook them into remembering. "Do you think we could have small group this week?" *nn* asks me as we sit between music and lesson, piled close like puppies in a thunderstorm, "With sixth grade boys and girls?"

We have breakout groups every week, splitting off by grade and gender, but she doesn't mean that at all. She means these kids, this dozen or so that are curled in as tightly as they can fit, jostling a little during music to determine who gets to be closest, falling into a formation so familiar that it really is just that.

These are their places, the spots where they stood last year on the other end of the building, rolling their eyes at childish songs and always ready to hurry off to small group. 

And, they settle into them like breathing, like we haven't spent the last 315 days building new ways of doing church. Like twenty minutes ago they weren't laughing and being thrown to the floor by male leaders who stand there like rocks, immovable to the force of twelve year old boys.

Or, perhaps, because of it.

In this space between resurrection and ascension, between damp wind and dry heat, between spring break and summer vacation, old things come to life. They cling a little tighter than they did in the confidence of Lent. There is the quiet worry, the anxiety of Easter, and the anticipation of change that is coming.

It's that time of year that has no name but carries a strange sense of clarity.

M*tt** takes his pen and, when the game is over, when we have to stop pretending that our circle is the only one in the room that matters, stabs holes in the paper that I gave him. And, I can see it in his eyes, the memory of the last time that he did this, the same wordless plea to be kept as near as we can manage.

They sit close and stand close. They are chased and caught and wrestled with. They fidget and break into my phone and their focus is all over the map. They raise their hands during worship and shout at inappropriate places in the songs and melt bonelessly so that I am forced to hold onto them a little longer.

They're older than last year and a thousand times more confident in the way that they communicate. There are half a dozen leaders here willing to engage with each of them at the drop of a hat, and the combination is magic. All behaviors are talking behaviors, but these ones require a lot less translation than the last time through this cycle.

It's just after Easter, and old things are coming back to life.

Together

7:11

175 middle school students. 25 leaders. 4 hours. 12 different activities. More candy and pop than ever ought to be consumed.

And, just like every other moment that is classically our kids, their favorite parts don't have anything to do with the extras at all.

Instead, they thrive on the parts where we pour into them, where they feel seen and protected and known without question. And, I am pretty sure that we break all the American stereotypes with our tweens and teens who would rather build a relationship with another person than take a sledgehammer to a junkyard car.

And, I love that about them.

S*rg**, with his wary eyes that take in everything, tells me that he is having fun, but even winning at dart tag (nerf gun battle) earns hardly any reaction until I ask him about it and a soft grin finally quirks out. That cheek splitting smile of his only makes an appearance once, when we both walk around a corner and he spots me for the first time all night - life pouring from his face like I never would have dreamed of when he was my traumatized little kindergartener with the long sleeves and glow in the dark gloves.

The seventh graders come en mase, always checking with laughing eyes to make sure that I have seen. The eighth graders watch out for the younger kids, carefully alert, bouncing between leaders, trying to learn by mimicry this art of being almost grown up, of taking care of smaller people.

Two girls return to my station to explain a trigger and get help in gaining a small victory over a fear.

M*t** checks in several times though the night, anything from a wander past to just a few sentences, only once staying long enough to chase him through the auditorium. He slows to a walk and relaxes in my basket hold for several heartbeats until I ruffle his hair and he spots a friend. He seems so confident and so at ease that I forget about the anxiety that eats at his heart.

M*tt** runs around with his friends and postures as flirtatiously as his cluelessly twelve year old self can muster. M*dd** and K*r*n come by with him several times to check in, his two female body guards. Both of the girls are giving me that look that says that M*tt** is out of control and I need to fix it.

He causes enough "trouble" at my station to earn himself a few catch and release maneuvers, but it isn't  focused enough to break through what is bothering him, and I can see the girls mentally settling in, prepared to follow him and run damage control for the rest of the night until I am free.

I forget to tell any of them that I am moving to a new work station. 

"Is this where you were?" M*dd** is almost scolding as they come up the stairs to play dart tag, as if the twenty minutes since I left jousting had been a month long quest, and, for the rest of the night, they stay within throwing distance - even with a sheet of black plastic between us.

"I found you." M*t** weaves his way out of the crowd that we have gathered back together for the end of the night and plants himself by my side. He stays there, sitting down with a thump, as if that will prevent my still standing self from leaving. I messed with his sense of safety when I "disappeared," and, as payment, he expects no comment about the fact that it is only the two of us, sitting a few feet back from the mass of bodies.

So, we sit, and we talk, and, when his dad comes to pick him up, he leaves happy again, if more than a little ready for bed.

"You know he's serious [about flirting]," M*dd** takes advantage of the rapidly thinning group to explain their current M*tt** predicament, "when he actually leaves my side. As soon as the girls leave, he'll be back."

And, he is.

Actually, he's back even before that, stealing her phone the moment it registers that their group is the only focus of my attention. And, finally, with my hands wrapped around his shoulders and hers grappling for the stolen electronic, he remembers, for a few minutes, that it is okay to breathe.

It's like we've vacuumed the manic right out of him. He settles in, showing off for me a little, like any boy with a new trick, and they start to just play. Four hours of activities, and this is what they've been waiting for all night. Just a half dozen of us, with nothing more exciting than a stack of cones and a Disney princess playground ball.

20 minutes, and they are content.

"My favorite was the snack bar," Kyr* says, "because it was the only time we weren't running and I could actually talk to my friends."

All night, I don't see a single phone used for anything besides taking pictures or video. Instead, they hang out with each other or work around the system to carve out time to hang with a leader. And, it's so anti everything that the media says that they are, that I can't help but be grateful for the chance to see their beautiful, messy reality.

Normal

This is how I spend my Sunday afternoons...supervising littles while they play in the gaga pit.

When they are feeling particularly epic, it becomes the staging field for World War II. They claim allied or axis forces, "I'm England!" "I'm Germany!" "I'm Japan!" and shift roles fluidly to match the actual game play - much the way that the middle schoolers claimed Hunger Games characters last fall.

When they get bored, we play hide and go seek or take them outside to play tag on the play structure. We eat snacks, read stories, have quiet time, and color pictures.

The kids at school make bracelets and weave bookmarks out of plastic canvas from my grandma. They run up for hugs at recess and expect solutions to current problems. We work together to mediate arguments, and they swing their hands in mine like it is the most natural thing in the world - and, occasionally, like they would prefer to never let go.

We play tag and monkey in the middle and pass around a "cheese touch" to kids who don't cross their fingers fast enough. We talk about friendships and behaviors and choices, and then we talk about them over and over again.

My first graders stop talking about Black Ops for long enough to play Batman and zombies and fly imaginary spaceships to Jupiter and Pluto, even though they inform me that, "Pluto isn't a planet anymore. It's a dwarf planet."

And, it's all just a part of the mass of quirks that make up my kids.

My Sunday school kids think that it is Christmas when they get to sit down and write thank you notes or put together little 'random act of kindness' packets, while the sixth graders still break out into the world's hugest grins when we play chase or my dad joins us in a game of keep away.

I have a four year old at church and a fourth grader at school who like to curl up on my feet, purring happily while they take a "nap." They are content to answer my questions with meows and growls and hisses, only resorting to words for more complicated communications.

Certain kids almost always stand or sit on a certain side, M*tt** just in front of me or M*t** on my right, and two of the second graders have verbally laid claim to their "favorite arm."

J*rr*tt fiddles with the can of nasty tangerine air freshener, and J*sh shoots rubber bands at anyone in sight. M*k** pounces me from the back and Cr**g*n from the side. N*ncy and Tyl*r try to sneak up on me, and D*n**l and Tr*v*s fade as quiet as they can to follow in my shadow.

They are bizarrely unique, which, I suppose, in the great mass of humanity, just makes them completely normal. 

Least of These: God's Story

Last week, we read about how God's people get to be incarnational, how they get to live like the people that they are living with, just like Jesus did. But, what if the people that we are living with have problems? What if they are hungry or thirsty or sick? What if someone is being unfair to them? What do you think that God's people are supposed to do then?

Yep. You guys are pretty smart. Not everybody has always thought that that was so simple. But, Jesus thought that it was important. Jesus thought that it was so important that He told a story about it. This is part of what He told the people who were listening.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” (Matthew 25:34-40)

When Jesus was incarnational, He used his words to tell people about God's story, his own story, but He also used His actions to show that God's story really was true. He fed people when they were hungry, not by making bread fall down from the sky, like in the Old Testament, but by finding out what the people he was with did have, and then making that little bit more...

Download a PDF of the entire story here and click on the activity pages below to download.

Quiet

Spring break. Sunshine. Early morning calm.

Common prayer, and a Creole learning app. Projects open. Scrivener. Open Office. iPhoto. A Blogger tab that is never finished.

Perspectives. Sunday School. Haiti preparations. SOLD.

A hammock swinging gently. Erasing Hell. Are Women People? Easy Readings in Spanish. Late afternoon quiet. Evening breeze.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Conversations about materialism and Haiti; beauty, creativity, and fashion. Because Haiti has informed every aspect of these kids, the way that the Rez once shaped our world.

Supernatural. A purring cat. Pen and paper. Journal.

Prayer. Written reminders of his faithfulness. Sunrise. Sunset. Desert. Emails and Facebook.

Life, this week, is quiet.

There is space for learning Creole, for new words and old words to swim together in my head, tenses and pronouns and basic vocabulary. Because, if I am going to encourage the kids to learn some Creole before we go, then I need to learn it too. More this year than last year. More last year than the year before.

It's surprisingly simple, this language. Except for when it's not. When the five forms of the same word make the difference between 'a' and 'an' seem like child's play. When I can't quite force my mouth to make the sounds, to drop the final 'n,' but, not always, and never completely.

Instead, it hovers in the empty space between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, surrounded by unfamiliar vowels that are almost phonetic, but not quite.

It rains, and, for the first time this year, the rain is warm, like even the sky has finally decided that summer is slowly on its way.