Bibles, Sunday School Boxes, and a Favor to Ask

(Faithful reader: Read through to the very end to get to the favor I'm asking of you.)

Had our daughters started going to Sunday school at St. John Lutheran Church when they were in kindergarten, they would have been given cardboard boxes to assemble and to decorate with their choice of religious symbols and drawings from Bible stories. In kindergarten, they would have pasted to their boxes printouts of the Lord's Prayer, and in first grade they would have done the same with the ten commandments. They would have been told to save and use the boxes throughout their future years of Sunday school and pre-confirmation study to store Sunday school readings, crafts, projects, and anything else from their religious classes at church.

However, because we're just now joining the church, Suzanna (fourth grade) and Abigail (third grade) missed out on that completely, and Hillary (first grade) got in on it a year behind her classmates. One Sunday morning a few weeks ago, while the other first-grade children were cutting out the ten commandments, Susan and I raided the nearby kindergarteners' supplies so that I could assemble a box for Hillary and Susan could offer Hillary a copy of the Lord's Prayer to paste onto the box, just as her classmates were doing. Before we went home that day, we grabbed supplies for Abigail and Suzanna, too, so that they could "catch up" and have boxes of their own.

To Susan and my disliking, the versions distributed of the Lord's Prayer and the ten commandments were written in "modern" language rather than the "who art in Heaven" and "thou shalt not" stuff with which we grew up. So I printed out copies of the more traditional versions of the Lord's Prayer and the commandments and daily prayers that we learned as children, and I gave them to the girls to use on their boxes. They spent some time today decorating their boxes:

We attended Sunday school classes with Hillary two weeks in a row when the parents were expected to do so to help the first-graders learn the ten commandments. We attended Sunday school with all three girls the following week (along with my visiting sister, Sandy) for the monthly family class that parents are expected to attend with their kids. The next week was last Sunday, which was the first of three consecutive Sundays that we're expected to attend class with Abigail while the third-graders have pre-confirmation classes. The three weeks thereafter, we will attend Sunday school with Suzanna while the fourth-graders take their turn with pre-confirmation lessons. What's in store for us beyond that--other than the monthly family Sunday school classes--I can't imagine, but I'd be surprised if we'll be let off the hook completely, judging by the pattern thus far.

(I recall fondly the days when Susan and I would walk the girls to their Sunday school classrooms and then drive to the nearby Starbucks for frou-frou coffees and lemon poppyseed pound cake and the New York Times crossword puzzle. You are missed, Calvary Lutheran Church!)

St. John gave the third-graders study Bibles: their own copies of Augsburg Fortress' The New Student Bible. Part of our first session with Abigail involved browsing the Bible with her, becoming familiar with its sections and indices, and assuring her that it is okay to write in this Bible . . . it's a study Bible with questions throughout for her response, and it's intended for her to mark her own questions and reactions as she reads. (We already had our own copy of that version of the Bible at home, so we gave it to Suzanna so that she, too, would have her own, even though she didn't spend her third-grade year at St. John.)

Part of Abigail's "homework" is to ask five loved ones each to write his/her own favorite Bible verse on the "notes" page in the back of her Bible and then to sign his/her name beside that verse within the Bible itself. If those loved ones live far away, the children have permission to find out those favorite verses via long-distance communication.

Faithful reader: What is your favorite verse in the Bible? Would you be willing to share it with Abigail (via my blog) so that she may record it in her Bible, despite the fact that you--her loved one--are too far away to sign her Bible yourself? Click on "comments" below and share away, please!