Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, May 12, 2024
Every week my father, who was not a churchgoer, would welcome us home from church with the same question. Week after week, year after year.
“Well,” he would say, “did you win anything?”
As a child I would earnestly tell him that church wasn’t that kind of thing, where you won prizes. As a teenager I would usually just give him a hug and ignore the question. Once in a while I would try to explain church to him.
I was born on a Saturday and attended church the next Saturday, I’m told. I haven’t missed many Sabbaths since.
When a major earthquake hit Alaska on March 27, 1964, it was late on a Friday night. We were hundreds of miles from the epicenter and major damage, but my father’s brother and family lived in that area and we anxiously waited for word from them and got little sleep.
When I woke the next day I was astonished to find it was late morning and my mother had gone to church without me. In her kindness she had let me sleep. I felt off-kilter. Not as unsettling as an earthquake, but still an almost unheard of change in my schedule.
On this Mother’s Day I’ve been mulling over the many gifts my mother gave me. It makes me smile to think of them. The gift that shines brightly for me at the moment is that she cultivated in me the habit of going to church.
And now I know how I could have answered my father’s weekly question! Yes, I did win something at church! Here’s what and how:
I won a sense of belonging, totally independent of anything I’d done to deserve it. All of the kids at church were “church kids.” It didn’t matter if you sat in the long center pews with all of your family, or like me, in a side pew that only held two people, my mother and me. Most summer Sabbaths the congregation would hike after lunch, and since my parents were older and non-hikers, someone would always pick me up and cheerfully give me a ride.
I won a sense of confidence. As a little kid I grew accustomed to 13th Sabbath programs, when the children’s Sabbath School divisions would prepare and perform for the grown-ups. We would recite our memory verses for the quarter and sing, with the congregation beaming back at us as if we were on stage at Carnegie Hall.
During my college years, one of the leaders, a mother of four, said it was good to have all of us home from college and why didn’t we take over all the church responsibilities for the summer? It wasn’t so much a question as a pronouncement, and so we found ourselves leading out in the children’s Sabbath School rooms, being mentored in other church positions, even giving sermons.
We gained confidence, and the knowledge that we were appreciated and trusted. We never got the idea that we could no do wrong, but that if we made mistakes, we still belonged.
I won an affection for the church, returning the love I felt from church members. There were plenty of characters in our congregation, but it seemed we all meant well and assumed the best of each other.
This may read as a love letter to my childhood church, and I suppose it is. But more than that, it’s a love letter to my mother. She worked hard as a full-time registered nurse during the week, but I never heard her sigh and consider staying home from church. We knew where we literally belonged, and made sure we were there.
And so she gave me the gift of belonging, the gift of confidence, the gift of affection for my church – all wrapped up in the priceless gift of learning to know a God who loved me unconditionally and would always be with me.
In the photo that heads this blog post my mother is holding me in her arms as she hosts a birthday party for one of my older sisters. Although I was too young to form a lasting memory of that moment, I know I felt the security and love of her arms. Thank you, Momma, for your love, and for introducing me to the God who has always held us both in His arms. I’ll hug you again when Jesus comes to resurrect and reunite. Each day, one day closer.