It's All About Timing

Last night was the Maundy Thursday service, which involves foot washing and solemn music and prayers.

Well, there was a lighter, if slightly awkward moment, during the children's sermon when the pastor, trying to illustrate the drama of Jesus' washing the disciples' feet, asked, "If the President were here, would you let him wash your feet?"

Whereupon one young boy piped up, "No, I wouldn't, 'cause I don't like the President, cause he lied this one time and . . . " (Our church is, I suspect, politically diverse but definitely not one where politics comes up in conversation much.)

But everyone expects lighter moments during the children's sermon and especially from this kid, who had also volunteered, when the pastor asked for examples of unimportant jobs, "Pastor!"

So the service had moved on to quiet, solemn prayers and music and it was to end with DOB singing a song, which I was supposed to accompany, and then, just at the last verse of the last song before it, Dot uttered those five little words which no mother of preschoolers delays to respond to for anything.

Still, perhaps there was time. So I swooped her up silently, figuring to steal rapidly out the back and return before the current round of music and prayers were done.

Only I neglected to calculate on the life-sized cross propped in the back of the sanctuary. As I swooped Dot out of the room, I clonked her forehead full-on against the cross-piece. Fortunately she was so startled and intrigued by the suddenly falling cross that she didn't actually scream, but then I had an urgently-needing-to-depart preschooler and a large crashing wooden object on my hands and the music running out.

I propped it up long enough to last until some attentive folks came to properly right in and then I dashed onward and got all my laughs out while Dot was in the bathroom and walked serenely back in just in the nick of time.