After six days of getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night (if lucky), attending classes, doing homework at the last minute, attending club meetings/events/socials, and somehow managing to squeeze in time to do the laundry, it’s a fabulous moment when I wake up on Sunday morning, forget everything, and head out to church.
Harbor church has to be the most fabulous church God’s beautiful hands have ever created. As a multi-ethnic congregation with fairly young, new couples, the children’s department is flooded with gorgeous happas (children of racially mixed parents): huge round eyes with mile-long, curved eyelashes, high cheekbones, brown eyes, green eyes, blue eyes, mexican, black, asian, white, european – the best of each race is represented together in these beautiful little children.
And I have the blessed opportunity to spend all Sunday morning with them. I teach Sunday School for the Paddleboat B class which are the older half of the pre-Kindergarden kids. Every Sunday I teach them a new Bible story. Moses parted the Red Sea, Lazarus was raised from the dead, Jesus made the blind man see and the final triump: Jesus rose again on the third day.
Baptized as a baby and confirmed in junior high, I am a CORE leader for a Christian campus ministry and have been faithfully serving in a church for the last 8 years of my life. I think it’s safe to say that I am a Christian and have been one for a very long time. I’ve always felt that I had been blessed with the gift of faith and have never been plagued by seasons of doubt.
I believed and that was that.
Yet as I walked in my Christian life I forgot sometimes that the Bible I carried and read wasn’t just the Bible which I was supposed to read out of that offered inspiration, correction and encouragement, but was actually truth. Or so I pronounced it as truth. It wasn’t till I began teaching these Pre-Kindergarden children when I realized that I didn’t really believe – I didn’t really have the faith I thought I did.
It was the day when I had to tell my students about Lazarus.
Lazarus was Jesus’ very close friend and also the brother of Mary and Martha. He was very ill and only got worse despite his sisters’ care. So they sent for Jesus telling him to come quick to heal their ailing brother. Jesus received the letter but delayed his response by a few days during which Lazarus died.
When Jesus arrived in Bethany Martha ran out to meet him telling him that he was too late, but Jesus simply replied, “Your brother will rise again.”
Jesus then went to the tomb where Lazarus lay and commanded him to “Come out!” And he did wrapped in his white linen grave clothes.
As I told this story to my kids I reminded them that this really happened, this isn’t just a story, this is truth.
And one of my kids said, “Yea, because Miss Sharon doesn’t lie!”
The rest of the class seem to accept this logic and nodded their heads. I realized that I was their standard for truth. Because of their trust in me, they believed – wholeheartedly – that Jesus really raised Lazarus from the dead.
And that made me rethink the details of the story that I just taught and realized how impossible the whole story was. How could a dead man who was entombed for four days rise again?
This is what God meant when He told us to have a childlike faith. Though I was supposed to teach my 5 year olds about Jesus, they ended up teaching me.
