Sometimes something you weren't sure you wanted to do can touch your heart.

The Other Family


When we lived in the big city we attended a large downtown church. It was an old church with many young families and an ongoing baby boom. The church had enough small children to give each year’s cohort its own Sunday school class. Each class typically had eight or ten or twelve children on a given Sunday. Naturally this created quite a need for Sunday school teachers and helpers.

I did not consider myself the likeliest candidate for this duty. While I love children and enjoy being around them, I had limited experience with them—none at all with groups of that size. In my work I had been accustomed to deal with college students, not small children. The thought of attempting something very different from my normal business always makes me nervous.

But I had a reputation as someone gentle and trustworthy enough to work with children. When I found myself tapped for service in the first-grade Sunday school, I felt like I could hardly say no. It was not as if I’d be running the show by myself. The class would have experienced ladies who actually ran everything. I would just help out. It was a job a responsible teenager half my age could do. So I agreed to help.

Every Sunday began with a play time. We had plenty of space for a class our size. The room must have seemed huge to a child. In one corner it had a toy kitchen area and strollers and baby dolls. Out to the side of this a set of shelves contained a huge supply of rather large building blocks of various shapes. We did not make a point of segregating girls in one area and boys in the other. One can imagine which group tended to gravitate toward which play area.

I had more experience dealing with young girls. It soon became apparent that I had quite a rapport with boys, though, so I spent most of my time in the block area with them. I became a kind of construction overseer, gently trying to make sure their creations were not too structurally unsound, keeping them from building dangerously high (those blocks were big enough to hurt one of the smaller children if they fell), and making sure they did not destroy each other’s handiwork. Sometimes they tried to build as high as they could reach. At other times they went low, building roads and ramps and bridges. There were usually plenty of Matchbox cars available for these courses.

Sometimes we segued into structured activity times, where children had snacks or made things out of paper plates and Styrofoam cups and such. One Sunday I was detailed to provide some bits of nature, so I spent part of the weekend combing nearby parks and college campuses for samples of moss, lichens, seed pods, and the like. The empty Cicada shell I found proved a real hit with the boys.

Then we would make sure everything had been put away and have the actual lesson. The teacher would go over the day’s Bible story. We might sing a song. The other adults would sit among the children and keep their attention focused.

After that we had a few minutes in which the children could play some more until their parents came to take them to worship. With the toys all put away they mainly had recourse to the room’s small book collection. The “I Spy” books were popular, as was a book with multicolored bugs that incorporated all kinds of different textures to touch.

Some of the children stand out especially well in memory. One was Nate. He had a pronounced autism spectrum problem. Nate was fairly well-behaved but had trouble interacting with others. He barely conversed. Mainly his talk covered the same few obsessive phrases and subjects over and over. I knew Nate’s parents. He occasionally had more serious manifestations of his trouble than anything I saw in class. It broke their hearts to see their child having the problems he did.

Another child, J.T., could hardly have seemed more different. Nate was passive and mostly quiet. J.T. was big for his age and aggressive, the type of child who can easily turn into a bully if not managed with care. He liked to build elaborate fortresses of blocks that represented his version of Howarts School.

J.T. was adopted. He had spent his earliest years in an Eastern European orphanage in what were probably unspeakable conditions. Perhaps his aggression had something to do with his earliest experiences in that Darwinian environment. I never knew. We kept our eye on him, trying always to achieve the delicate balance of strictness and mildness an aggressive and highly spirited child needs.

Then there was Lilly. Lilly was a sweet little girl, if a bit mischievous now and then. She had been known to pinch flowers from the arrangements at the front of the sanctuary during the pastor’s time with the children at the beginning of each Sunday worship service. Lilly liked to crawl into my lap when she wanted to read. I did not mind, but other teachers made her stop. There were not enough laps to go around for everyone who might want to sit in one. We could not appear to play favorites.

That year Lilly’s father, a reserve Army officer, was sent to Iraq. It’s hard for those of us who haven’t experienced it to imagine what it must be like to have to do without a father you love for reasons a child can’t really understand. Lilly had more to worry about than a child her age should have to have.

At the school year’s end all the children graduated into new classes. We teachers were shuffled a bit as well. I found myself assisting in kindergarten now.
Most of my memories of kindergarten Sunday school involve Sam. He was a small boy with glasses and some developmental problems. Sam never spoke a word that I heard. He did sometimes make vocal sounds.

Sam was nonetheless expressive in his quiet way. He latched onto me for some reason. He would often take my hand and lead me around the room to participate in whatever took his interest, whether it was rearranging the shelves in the play kitchen or methodically packing an old suitcase with bits of clothing and odds and ends as if preparing to take a trip. Sometimes we could not get Sam to sit with the rest of the children for the lesson. I would be detailed to supervise his play out by himself. He usually seemed pretty content.

In the middle of that year the time came for us to leave the city and move to a small town in another state. We go to a far smaller church now. I have not yet been approached to work with the children there. I suppose for now my calling is to be a part of the adult Sunday school, where my talents probably work better anyway.

Everybody by now has heard the saying “It takes a village to raise a child.” The saying is quite true. Parents need others—extended family, neighbors, community institutions. Sadly most of these helps have eroded badly in our society. A good church can still help fill the need. All my life I’ve heard references to “the church family.” That time working with Sunday school taught me more about what that means. We are inded a family. And through this bigger family even we who have no children to call our own can take part in the great task of raising them.