Playing Church

With all the calling hours, and funeral services, and burial in the last few days - I have been thinking about my grandma a lot which, in turn, has caused me to think about my childhood a lot.

This story needs to start with a little background on my family. My grandma is definitely the most faithful person I have ever met. She completely trusted in God for all matters and relied on prayer to get her through much of her life. She faithfully went to church every week until her death and sang in the church choir her entire life also. She instilled the same faithfullness in all around her.

So, when we were little kids we used to also play "make-believe" in the hay mow. A lot of times we would be olden days which was probably due to watching too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie , most other times we would just dare each other to jump giant distances between hay stacks (this second one resulted in a few close calls including one particular instance where my brother, Mitchell was holding on for dear life between two stacks, praying he would not fall the remaining 25 feet to the ground). Finally, we often times played church . Which is sort of an exagerration of what we would do, because we never really took the time to do the entire mass, but instead would do communion. over and over again. We would set up bales as pews and an altar and get communion from my grandma. (either cookies or crackers or whatever she would let us eat that day) and I had the entire eucharistic ceremony memorized word for word so I would be the priest. And when it got to the part where the priest holds up the eucharist and says a chant, I would sing the lion king song.....you know, a-simbetina- namaneishama- kubaya.Or something like that.

So, one day we are playing church in our house and we're scouring the house looking for something to use for communion when we stumble across a pack of big red gum. Which would be an absolutely delicious choice for communion. So we're getting all exciting about having gum, especially spicy, firey gum like big red, when my brother Alex exclaims, We can't use that gum. Red is the color of the devil!