Unwritten Cultural Laws of a Kindergarten Classroom

1. Everything is a state of emergency. Everything.

2. If your daily helper responsibility is door opener or line leader, do all that you can to fulfill your duties, including pushing and hitting others so that they do not try to usurp your responsibility.

3. Narrate your life to your teacher. It’s a well-known fact that teachers want — nay, need -- to be informed of your every action at all times. Once you complete a task, such as putting the purple crayon back into your box, you must notify the teacher.

4. Your teacher is the final arbiter in any dispute within the classroom. If you know the jumbo-sized pencil is yours and your best friend who found it doesn’t know, tell your teacher first before you let your best friend know that it’s yours.

5. To avoid bladder infections, go to the bathroom at least ten times a day.

6. If your pencil is sharpened, it probably needs to be sharpened.

7. If your best friend’s pencil is sharpened, your pencil probably needs to be sharpened.

8. Screaming burns calories, and our teachers want us to be healthy.

9. If you see any grown-up in your school that even looks remotely like a teacher (key characteristics including but not limited to female, black pants, frenetic gait), you have the right to hug that person.

10. Your teacher needs to know that you love her. Hug her at least 20 times a day. If you haven’t met your quota for hugs and you remember you need to give her hugs, do so immediately. Your teacher won’t mind if it’s in the middle of the math lesson or during story time.

the secret is Christ in me

"The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances."

[Elisabeth Elliot]

furnace of doubt

"It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

dearly beloved, we gather together

be still

less about our lamentable inability to be heard than our inherent flawed condition

"Just One God" by Deborah Cummins

And so many of us.
How can we expect Him
to keep track of which voice
goes with what request.
Words work their way skyward.
Oh Lord, followed by petition —
for a cure, the safe landing.
For what is lost, missing —
a spouse, a job, the final game.
Complaint cloaked as need —
the faster car, porcelain teeth.
That so many entreaties
go unanswered
may say less about our lamentable
inability to be heard
than our inherent flawed condition.

Why else, at birth, the first sound
we make, that full-throttled cry?
Of want, want, want.
Of never enough. Desire
as embedded in us as the ancestral tug
in my unconscienced dog who takes
to the woods, nose to the ground, pulled far
from domesticated hearth, bowl of kibble.
Left behind, I go about my superior business,
my daily ritual I could call prayer.

But look, this morning, in my kitchen,
I’m not asking for more of anything.
My husband slices bread,
hums a tune from our past.
Eggs spatter in a skillet.
Wands of lilac I stuck in a glass
by the open window wobble
in a radiant and — dare I say it?—
merciful light.

the ear of sovereign grace attends the mourner's prayer

Hast Thou not bid me seek Thy face, 

And shall I seek in vain?
And can the ear of sovereign grace,
Be deaf when I complain?
No still the ear of sovereign grace,
Attends the mourner's prayer
Oh may I ever find access,
To breathe my sorrows there

Thy mercy seat is open still,
Here let my soul retreat
With humble hope attend Thy will,
And wait beneath Thy feet...

[Anne Steele]