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.