It always seemed perfectly normal to me that there was a picture of me hanging on the wall of the church nursery while I was growing up. It hung next to a photo of a beefy, infant Scott Martin. I was almost born in church. I certainly grew up in church. Just as family photos hang on the walls of a home, why wouldn’t our baby photos have hung on church walls?

I also grew up with Scott and Jason. I sat in 6 years of Sunday school with these two (and the occasional, inevitably male, visitor, i.e. Jason Park) and at some point despaired of ever having female companionship. But it’s funny the way things get to feeling normal and work their way into your psyche. To this day I think of myself as the only girl in my Sunday School class, and I still think of these two guys as being my classmates.

Other, subtler, details have also ingrained themselves in my memory: The alphabet wall paper in the toddler classrooms, the fuzzy brown carpet that staples would get stuck in, the taste of nilla wafers and apple juice, the memory of singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” the feel of felt boards, the smell of gas that used to pervade the kitchen, and the echo you could produce in the gym or breezeway.

When I was 11ish, I ran down the flight of stairs next to the stage in the gym holding a koosh ball. Somebody else wanted it, and I wasn’t about to give it to them. I ran full speed and tried to push the door open. The door didn’t open. It didn’t open because someone was on the other side of the door, holding it shut. That person was Jason Parks. So I smashed my face into the solid wood door and knocked some of my braces off. Then I got in a van and went to camp.
When I was 14ish and sitting on the edge of the stage in the gym, Scott Martin walked up to me, grabbed me by the ankles, and pulled me off the stage and onto the gym floor.

Come to think of it, I spent much of my childhood wanting to murder these two guys who bugged me like the older brothers I never had, and yet church wouldn’t be the same without all that suffering. Cuz churches aren’t places or buildings, so much as families and I sure loved the church family I grew up in–even if I wanted to kill some of it sometimes.

Families change, and people come and go. It’s comforting to have connections no matter how far afield I get, and to have the sense that my childhood church home and the safe comfort I felt in it is still with me.

Which reminds me: Amy, I’m pretty sure it was you who taught me how to fold the tri-fold mirror in the old women’s bathroom in on myself so that I could see my own image go on forever in 360 degrees. And I’m not sure who first introduced me to wheelchair racing, but I know the Lord wouldn’t have made those sanctuary rows so wide if he didn’t mean us to drag race down them.

No theology in this post, but I’m beginning to recall that play once used to be a big part of my connection to faith. Maybe something worth thinking about.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under From the nation of Indig. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.