Church Nursery Windows
When our little family of six moved to our little rural town about 18 years ago, we tried to keep our ties with our home church in Eugene. However, it didn't take long before we began to drift.
The drive to get there was long. We didn't see our friends during the week any more. We were adjusting to a new school and lifestyle.
Then my husband began not going. That was hard. Hard not to give way to the fear that I might become one of those Sunday widows who sat in church alone, taught the children alone; her absent husband watching a football game, or something…
A gentle, refreshing breeze blew into our home the day we visited our new home church. We kept going back. The kindness and friendliness of the people, and the love for God demonstrated, was just too hard to resist! To familiarize myself with my new "family," I offered my domestic services to the pastor's wife. I told her I would clean, scrub, arrange chairs. My intent was to observe the goings-on in the church office and schoolrooms during the day, and make myself known.
The building was the city’s original schoolhouse, so the large rooms are heavily windowed, including the doors to the hall. The pastor's wife had requested I clean the windows weekly, so I did. It wasn’t till months later that I realized she had meant only the hall door windows—the ones where babies wiped their melted cracker slime on the glass and older brothers pressed their noses. But here I was, faithfully climbing up the shaky ladder every week to reach the highest corners of the windows to the courtyard that certainly didn’t need it!
The drive to get there was long. We didn't see our friends during the week any more. We were adjusting to a new school and lifestyle.
Then my husband began not going. That was hard. Hard not to give way to the fear that I might become one of those Sunday widows who sat in church alone, taught the children alone; her absent husband watching a football game, or something…
A gentle, refreshing breeze blew into our home the day we visited our new home church. We kept going back. The kindness and friendliness of the people, and the love for God demonstrated, was just too hard to resist! To familiarize myself with my new "family," I offered my domestic services to the pastor's wife. I told her I would clean, scrub, arrange chairs. My intent was to observe the goings-on in the church office and schoolrooms during the day, and make myself known.
The building was the city’s original schoolhouse, so the large rooms are heavily windowed, including the doors to the hall. The pastor's wife had requested I clean the windows weekly, so I did. It wasn’t till months later that I realized she had meant only the hall door windows—the ones where babies wiped their melted cracker slime on the glass and older brothers pressed their noses. But here I was, faithfully climbing up the shaky ladder every week to reach the highest corners of the windows to the courtyard that certainly didn’t need it!
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