What A Friend We Have In Jesus

Sunday morning you knew where you would be. When we were little we would sit at low wooden tables in low wooden chairs and listen to the Sunday school teacher read bible stories and we would rehearse saying verses from the bible. We learned about David and that giant Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, Sampson and Delilah, Moses-in-the-bulrushes, Moses parted the Red Sea and smote the Pharaoh and his Egyptians, and Jonah and the whale. The stories provoked wonder and awe about the power of God. All the while, Jesus looked down on us approvingly from the wooden picture frame on the wall. These were our first superheroes.

I don’t recall any of us acting ugly in Sunday school. We must have come from really good families or we feared the wrath of the same God that drowned all those bad Egyptians.

Morning worship service now that was a different matter. The only churches that had cushions in their pews back then had different cars in their parking lots, too. Wooden pews and little bottoms make for a regular squirm-fest. And our attention spans can only accommodate what our seats can endure. I think I heard my dad say that. So one particularly squirmy Sunday, yours truly slipped from his seat to the floor below and ducked down on all fours beneath the pew in front and crept from pew to pew to the front of the church where the pews stopped. Apparently the no-man’s land that stretched about twelve feet before the chancel was easily negotiated and then it was only up two steps to the choir loft. Then it was an easy fifteen or twenty feet across to where the minister’s throne sat. When my mom asked me what in the world I must have been thinking, I remember thinking there sure was a lot of hardened chewing gum stuck to the underside of all those pews.

I liked Bible school in the summer because that’s when we got to have refreshments and do crafts. Refreshments were welfare cookies and Kool Aid mostly. Sometimes we’d get popsicles for refreshment. On the last night of Bible school we’d occasionally have home- cranked ice cream.

We flew kites in the name of Jesus. We built model cars one summer. I never got the intended message that was supposed to go along with these activities but, hey, God is great. This was before they stopped marketing model car cement to kids on account of the possible dangers inherent from breathing the intoxicatingly sweet- smelling inhalants. (Come to think, I always enjoyed filling the tank on the lawnmower too. I started mowing the parsonage grass at something like eight years old). I and my neighbor Jerry tried setting our cars on fire after crashing them into each other on the sidewalk that ran in front of the church. It’s easy to glop model cement onto the trunk and strike a match to it. That stuff burns like nobodies’ business. Looked just like the real thing, too.