Feels Like Home

Last Wednesday night Tony and I gathered together the diaper bags, the shoes, the lovies, the play beads, and our Bibles and headed down the street to Wednesday night supper at our church.  This was a first time experience for three out of four of the Morlandts.  I smiled inside as I watched their wide eyes taking in all the gastric goodness.  The cafeteria line held scratch-made chili, grilled cheese, and baked potatoes.  An unidentified pink marshmallow fluff concoction (almost as familiar to me as the jello mold with encased grapes and peaches of my childhood).  And around the corner?  Chicken fingers with salad beside the most exciting item of all:  caramel apples.  Actually Rocky Road apples, caramel chocolate apples, and candied apples. 

Suddenly I was nine years old again.  Eating dinner in our small town Baptist fellowship hall before heading to Children's Choir to practice my lines and solo as Noah's wife.  Sitting in the back of the sanctuary with my friend Mary as my mom practiced in the adult choir.  When we thought no one was looking we would lay on our backs, grab the bottom of the pew, and thrust ourselves forward under each pew until we reached the front of the sanctuary.  At which point we would sneak out the side door, run down the hall, and burst into the girls bathroom, laughing hysterically.  It was there, bursting into the bathroom, that I received the scar on the bottom of my chin as I tripped and fell forward onto the hard, unforgiving tile floor.  I learned the hard way the wisdom behind the admonishment, "Girls, don't run in the hall!"

Now, twenty years later, I was entering a larger fellowship hall with my own little children.  Children, who thankfully, are not old enough to thrust themselves under pews.  We attend a very large church, yet as I walked into the fellowship hall last Wednesday I was transported to the small, country church I grew up in.  It was the same mix of elderly, wise saints, and small rowdy children.  Young parents socializing, smiling volunteers serving up good cheer and down-home food in the line.  It felt like home.  I caught myself searching the crowd for these two: 

 

 

And here I was with my own, growing family.  With Tony now on four months of anesthesia he is home everyday by 5:00, no call, no weekends.  This freedom allowed us to leave the fellowship hall last Wednesday night with satisfied tummies and hearts.  Tony and I carried our Rocky Road apples to go, dropped the children off in their rooms, and held hands as we went to study God's word together.  

How much I enjoyed soaking in the blessing of being with "family" - the family of my heart and womb, and my family of brother and sisters in Christ.