Reblogged from Covenant
Thirty years ago this weekend, I was promoted. I had started first grade a week before, and, at the Rally Day assembly, I mumbled through my assigned recitation (a short poem). The Sunday School superintendent handed me a brand-new, black leather King James Bible, with my name written on the inside cover in her elegant hand. The inscription also notified me that I was now a member of the Junior Department of the Sunday School at Saint John’s Church.
To everyone at Saint John’s, though, I was really joining “Mrs. Truax’s class.” It seemed even then that she had been teaching forever. She had taught my mother back in the early Sixties, when the church was brimming with Baby Boomer children, a class in every corner of the Sunday School annex.
It was rather different on my promotion day, when amid the inevitable fluctuations of children’s attendance, our congregation found itself at a low ebb. I was the only promotion we’d had in several years, and the Junior Department was to be composed of me and about a dozen sixth graders. It was rather abrupt to shift from felt boards one week to reading through the Book of Esther in seventeenth-century prose the next, but I was proud at being able (mostly) to follow the lines in my new Bible.
