More Tales From the Altar

My family just can't seem to get enough inappropriate church behavior squeezed into our busy lives. This morning started off quite good....Bailey went straight to the nursery without even spending the usual requisite amount of time in the pew with us getting told to "shhhh" every 5 minutes. Since the nursery is really just a room off to the side of the sanctuary with toys, sometimes she comes and goes several times throughout the service. Today, she was playing happily when I went to get her for the children's sermon. She always likes to go up front with grandma but today she wanted me to take her. This made me happy and I was pleased to take her up front. She picked a spot on the altar, and all was well. That is, until she started lifting up her skirt. Now, I know she's only 3 years old and it's kind of cute when little ones do things like this, but since she was sitting RIGHT BESIDE THE PASTOR AND ALL EYES WERE ON HIM (AND HER), I wanted to nip that in the bud. So, I nonchalantly put my hand on the bottom of her skirt and whispered, "We don't lift up our dress in public, sweetie." This evoked a very loud and emphatic (and a little bit picked up by the pastor's lapel mic), "It's not a DRESS, it's a SKIRT!" Well, excuuuuuse me....I guess I have to be spot on with my admonishments or I get chastised by my toddler. Anyway, she kept trying to kick her legs up and show her underwear and I kept trying to subtly keep her from doing it. She caught on pretty quickly and tried to push me away. As a parent of a tantrum-prone toddler, the question always becomes how far you push discipline in situations like this as you don't know whether a little bit will take care of it enough to avoid causing an episode or if even a small gesture will result in full-on screaming. Hearkening back to my previous post about the disastrous choir performance, I spent the next few minutes thinking, "How long IS this children's sermon, anyway??" Fortunately, it ended fairly quickly after that and we all got back to our seats without any more drama.

Then, the next situation arose during communion. The back story here is that I'm ALWAYS a bit nervous about taking communion in the Lutheran church. The churches I've always gone to serve communion at your seat, so I worry about the protocol when I have to go up front....how do I hold my hands, do I eat the bread immediately or keep it until the line can eat together? It seems like, no matter how many times I do it, I still walk up there with a little bit of trepidation. Today, I wasn't too worried about it and I got through it just fine. Then, the pastor came over to me, held his hand up about chest high and started talking. Let me just cut to the chase and say that he was blessing my unborn baby just like he does children who go up there but are not old enough to take communion. BUT, he's never done that before and it took me a minute to figure it out. My thought process was such that I wondered why he was starting whatever he was doing with me and not Jason, who was to my right. And, the way he was holding his hand, I thought (for a fleeting moment) that I was supposed to take his hand. So, once I figured it out, it was amusing to me that I almost shook his hand when he was actually blessing my burgeoning belly. So, after he moved on down the line, I told Jason that I almost ruined a very nice moment by shaking the pastor's hand like a goober....AND HE STARTED LAUGHING AGAIN. I tried really hard, but I laughed, too. Now, this wasn't like last week when we really got out of control. But, the fact that we were at the altar of God and taking communion just made it seem wrong. Good gosh, I think we're being tested....and we might be failing!