HMMMM

I want you to imagine something. Imagine you are a young child again. Assuming you went to Church as a young child, what is your earliest memory from church? Is it sitting in a classroom learning about Jesus? Is it running through the Church halls with your friends only to be scolded by someone whom you weren’t even related to? These are some of my early memories, but not my most prominent memory. That one happened when I was very young. I remember being 2 years old and singing,

A sunbeam, a sunbeam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, A sunbeam, a sunbeam, I’ll be a sunbeam for him.

I also remember being 4 years old and singing in Sunday School, “Rock-a-my soul in the bosom of Abraham” and not understanding what that meant but knowing that I didn’t want to be at the end of the bench. Because, while singing that song you had to rock back and forth and we would always try really hard to knock that last person off the bench during the song.

The team of teachers that taught us were a husband and wife. Thirty years later, when I would visit that church with my own children, they were still leading the 4’s and 5’s Sunday School. By my calculations, that is more than 35 years in that position. 35 years volunteering in the service of the King. That is amazing, especially amazing considering the amount of prestige given to teachers of young children.

I have personally been told by many well meaning Christians that teaching young children is good practice for the more important teaching of those who are older. That must mean that that husband and wife team were really bad teachers if they had to spend 35 years or more in that one department. Hmmm.

I have been told that my service in the Sunday School nursery is a waste of my talents. I could be teaching an adult class, or even older children, a class with some “real” meaning. It didn’t really matter what I did with the infants and toddlers, because they wouldn’t remember it anyway. Hmmm.

There is a myth among many Christians today. It is that nothing important happens in the younger years, that it is only when we are older that our spiritual education matters. However, I would contradict that myth with one simple fact. We learn the most important thing in those early years. We learn:

“Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong, They are weak but He is strong. Yes Jesus loves me, yes Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.”

This one song, while so incredibly simple, is probably the most profound song we will sing in our Churches and our in our lives. If we don’t learn the basic fact in this one song, that Jesus LOVES us, then Christians, regardless of their age, will never fully comprehend the blessings of the life we have been called to live