Today I had the highest honor of teaching the 4 yr old class at church. They are SO cute. For some reasons, all the little girls in this class have names that start with “A” – and that makes life so very much harder than necessary for a substitute like myself. I’m good with names. Normally. But not 6 “A” names. One of them walks in the door and all I can do is squint, think hard, and come up with, “Huh. It starts with an ‘A’….” over and over and over and over again.

I’d been there 2 minutes when my one little “A” girls collapsed in my lap in a fit of tears. TWO MINUTES, and I broke a perfectly good kid. I asked her what she’d done this weekend and she told me what relatives she’d visited and then she just fell apart because she missed them so much and they lived so far away. She cried. I held her in my lap and patted her back and talked her through it. Then she patted my back. Then I thought I’d cry because that’s just so sweet. But I didn’t because more “A” girls started showing up and there was stuff to do.

The boys, whose names are more varied, practically taught the lesson themselves when they built a fort that kept coming apart and we needed to discuss the walls of Jericho falling. Helpful, those boys.

After church I went to the bathroom to wash my feet. All through the service I was very aware of how dusty and dirty they were from the playground. A girl about 10 came in and immediately asked me what I was doing. I explained. She looked unimpressed. “Well. They do that a lot in the Bible. Wash feet.”

“Exactly! I was just thinking that myself,” I said and smiled at her. I didn’t know who she was and was about to ask her name when she rolled her eyes and said, “We aren’t in the Bible,” and turned and walked away with a commendable amount of sass for such a cute kid. I decided I liked her but didn’t really want to talk to her anymore, finished washing my feet, and didn’t hang around to ask her name.

It probably started with “A.”

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