SCENES FROM A SUNDAY SCHOOL PAPER [M, 1-29-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—SCENES FROM A SUNDAY SCHOOL PAPER [M, 1-29-24]

 

I love stories. Always have. Doesn’t everybody?

My late great friend, Herb Beuoy, once told me that his grade-school daughter said to him, “Daddy, sometimes you preach, and sometimes you tell stories. When you tell stories, I listen. When you preach, I read my Sunday School paper.”

Of course. Those little papers they hand out at the end of Sunday School have stories.

I especially like stories that have a successful ending. That doesn’t necessarily mean “happy,” as in “they lived happily ever after.” But I like it when the story ends with people getting whole, having gone through trials and tribulations, but ending by making a real connection with another person, with their own true self, with God.

I saw a movie like that recently, and I wished that my life could be like that, a moment of real contact and wholeness with some other person, or myself, or God. A moment that freezes on the back of the eyes, the way the last scene of that movie did in my eyes. The way I could keep seeing it as I went to bed and played it over and over…

But that is not the way real stories end. There is only one ending like that in real life, and that is the death scene. In 50 years of ministry, and almost 90 years of life, I’ve lived in hundreds, probably thousands of those scenes where contact is made, wholeness is experienced, growth is jubilated… but the story didn’t stop there. No time to luxuriate in the joy. I had to drive home from the hospital and deal with crazy drivers. Or empty the dish washer before I realized the damn dishes were dirty. Or answer a scam telephone call… All the things that take a whole moment and break it into shards of anger and frustration.

Our stories are told mostly in scenes mundane or broken. A whole lot of crazy people and dirty doings and annoying intrusions. We can’t take a moment of wholeness and just live in it forever, the way the people in a movie or a book do. But those are the moments that give life meaning. Those are the scenes from your life that would show up in a Sunday School paper.

John Robert McFarland