skipping church leads to smoking

**disclaimer:  This post is not a confession to anything that may or may not have happened concerning me and Brad Kile, my mom’s Nissan Maxima, and us being the only 2 guys in the youth choir at Second Baptist Church.  Nothin to see here, folks, now move along…

Skipping church is not really an option for the pastor’s family.  Like it or not, if your dad is the pastor, you’re pretty much guaranteed a seat when the doors of the church are open.  But every once in a while, you catch a break.  Such was the case this weekend.

Calvary’s been doing CityServe for several years now.  We have a great team of people working hard behind the scenes to line up jobs, organize the whole shebang, and promote the event.  Once a year, we cancel our worship gatherings and send people out into the city to serve.  It lines up real well with our vision to be a church without walls.  Folks go out to rake leaves, plant gardens, clean and paint homes, build stuff, deliver homebaked goods to the local firefighters and police officers, and help out in nursing homes.

This year my family and I headed out to a local nursing home, where I got to MC the morning’s worship/singing.  We had a brass quintet from PSU, the Balogh family woodwind band, the very talented McKinstry family, Steve Lutz and his boys, and the Sublett family + Jess Neal all bringing their musical talents to the party.  There were a number of other people there who joined in the singing, helping the residents find the songs and lift their voices.  My kids had a good time, and we even got Annabelle to join us in singing “Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord.”  (That’s the song I sing with Sadie and Annabelle every night, sort of a prayer that I pray over them.)

After a relaxing afternoon (that means a nap for me!) I noticed that the sun was shining, and the time was right to reward Sadie and Annabelle with their surprise.  I got the fire going, and invited them to join me on the back porch for Annabelle’s first excursion into S’moreland.  She loved them!  She was a little scared of the fire, but wolfed down the first smore that I made for her, and even asked for another one!  Lilly told her that if she liked this, she’s going to love spending time at Boompa’s (our kids call Kim’s mom Boompa–that’s a story for another day) campground this summer!  I got some great pictures of marshmallow streaming from Annabelle’s lips, but the pics are on Lilly’s camera, which is somewhere in the tornado-zone that she calls a room.  If the Search and Rescue folks turn it up, I’ll post them later.

It took about 2 minutes of post-smore activity before Sadie and Lilly started playing with the fire.  What is it about a fire that begs us to start poking around in it, burning twigs and leaves?  The girls love to light the end of a little stick and wave it around in the air, tracing smoke patterns like Penn State’s Blue Sapphire.  The next thing I know, Sadie’s got her firebrand stuck in her lips like a long cigarette, and she’s singing “Cruella DeVille, Cruella DeVille, if she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will…”

Hilarious.  I love my kids.  But I’m going to make sure that they’re in church next week, or else they might discover dancing…