Don’t flay the sheep.

2 Books

I did it! I managed to read some books! (I am so woefully behind on things I want and need to read, so getting through these two feels like a accomplishment.)

Last week, I finished Teaching Kids Authentic Worship. It looked so promising when I picked it up from a book table. I burned through it in a night. I couldn’t stand it. The author’s premise is that true worship is praising God simply for who God is, not for the nice things God does for us. We don’t teach kids how to do that. We could—they could be able to rattle off and marvel at God’s attributes the same way they can rattle off stats about their favorite sports-pop-tv-movie-star. OK, I can handle that: we should teach kids to do that. But the author argued that this type of praise is ALL that worship is. The other stuff doesn’t count. And, she said that we should teach them this OUTSIDE of the worship service. What a downer–the first book I really manage to slog through in the last few months, and I didn’t like it.
But then today, I immersed myself in this fabulous, minister-nerdy, dense, and did I say fabulous book Confirmation: Presbyterian Practices in Ecumenical Perspective, by Richard Robert Osmer. I left the baby with my Mom and went across the street to the library, found a comfy chair and within 5 pages I was hooked. (By the way, thanks to Susan for recommending this author.) It was exactly what I needed to read (I can’t make ay sense out of what I’m supposed to do with my confirmands…): a psychological, sociological, cultural, historical, theological review of everything you could ever want to know about confirmation. I was in nerdy-minister heaven. I wanted to jump up on my comfy chair and yell, “Hey, this is the best book ever…you all have GOT to read this.” (Probably wouldn’t have gone over too well in the quiet reading room of th public library.) I remembered, maybe for the first time since I left seminary, why I liked all the reading in seminary. I think angels started singing in the background and my brain re-gained some of the cells it lost in the mushy post-partum period.

And so, tomorrow, I will face down the pile of e-mails awaiting me and the giant to-do-list on my whiteboard, and I will think to myself, “I can do all this, because I can READ!! And, if I get this done, I can try to think about how to make confirmation even better!!”

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