Butterfly, Elephant, and Dog


Emilee was a butterfly for her second grade program.  How fitting!  Her life seems to be about flitting from one activity to the next--not spending too much time on any one thing.   She wants to stay busy, and hates being bored. 

She is all about beauty.  She is incredibly artistic and has an eye for aesthetics.  Paul recently won an elephant at a Valley Fair field trip he chaperoned.  He brought it home for Em.  She played with it for awhile, and then brought it to me and asked, "Do you think I could ask Daddy if we could sew it into a dog?"  I looked at it and wondered to myself, "How the heck am I going to make that into a dog?"  But I was impressed by her thoughtfulness--how she wanted to get Dad's permission since he won it for her--so I said, "sure."  She and Dad chatted: a dog would be just fine.  She brought it back to me, and started to give me instructions.  I seriously would not have known how to do it, but she knew exactly how to reshape it--she just needed me to do the stitching. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kids in spring!

Image
Faith missed her piano recital because her Girl Scout troop went to Mary Poppins in Minneapolis, but we recorded her song.  This is just a sample.  Samuel had a great spring concert.  He alone played the bass line for kids who "improv'd" on a song.  Can't seem to get a video up, but here's a pic of him hiding behind a music stand, blowing away.  Emilee turned 8!  A pic from her party. 
Read more

Was Jesus Polarizing?

Was Jesus a polarizing figure? My church will do a worship series on polarization during Lent.   Wish us luck!   People are already asking me, “Are you really going to ask me to interact with others whose views are so off course that they would become violent?”   That response is incredibly telling of the dynamics at play within our society—that people automatically go to the extreme without seeing the rest.   The goal of this series is to investigate whether the life of Jesus teaches us anything about polarization. I’ve been doing some scriptural research.   And I got to tell you: it’s been a tough day.   You know when you are reading a novel and you prescribe a personality, tone of voice, and temperament to a character?   It’s almost like you can hear their voice in your head as you are reading dialogue.   The author of the story, of course, plants all the seeds through their character development, but ultimately the reader’s own lens gives the character life.   (This is why p
Read more

PRIDE week communion

Image
It's PRIDE month.  For the last three years, June has been a really strange time in ministry for me.  People often refer friends, relatives, and colleagues to talk through issues around identity and gender diversity.  I get calls from people dissatisfied with their own church's stance who are trying to figure out steps to allyship.  I get calls from parents trying to do the right things.  But the most holy calls I get are from people from the LGBTQIA community, folks looking for hope after church rejection, spiritual trauma, and family rejection.   These folks are brave:  brave to recount the pain, brave to dare to accept themselves, brave to let themselves sense a glimmer of healing grace.  Their stories are sacred, and I feel nothing but gratitude that I'm let into this sacredness.   Recently I was asked by a group to provide a two-minute speech about the power of story-telling during a time of holy conferencing (the nice version of debate) at the gathering of Minnesota U
Read more