By: Amelia McDaniel, Lay Associate for Christian Formation
I spent several years as the religion teacher at an Episcopal day school in Baton Rouge. I taught about 300 students from PreK – 5th grade. They called me Church Lady and I loved it. I wish I had written down all the things they said and did, because there are some hysterical and profound stories.
One day I was teaching the story of the Good Shepherd to a group of Kindergartners. I talked about how the Good Shepherd led his sheep to green pastures and cool still waters and through the dark rocky places. I told them that the Good Shepherd knew all his sheep by name and if even one of them was missing he would go out to find them and bring them home. I used big pieces of felt and small wooden sheep and shepherd to tell the story. At the end of the story, Warren, a darling, precocious boy with strawberry blond curls and freckles all over his big moon face shook his head. He had the best gravelly little voice I had ever heard from a 5-year-old.
I don’t know Miss Amelia….”That Good Shepherd must have had some kind of good GPS system to not get lost out there.”
Warren, the son of an avid Louisiana outdoorsman, knew how easy it is to get lost travelling in the wilderness without some help.
David helped us start off this Lenten season by reminding us that God has a burning question for us all, and it has been his question since the garden…. Where are you? We humans have gotten very good at hiding. From God. From each other and from ourselves. And the call of Lent is to try to stop hiding so much and show up. Not an easy task.