Here in Kansas we are snowed-in after a day and half of flurries, but now sunlight slides across the snow. All is bright and white. Teckla and I have been sitting on the couch looking out the window at the melting snow sliding off the redbud tree. All is clean.
For some Sunday memories are sad, or even angry. I would like to sing a different song this morning. I have been sitting by a stream of Sunday church kid memories. When I was a boy, I played outside all week: catching snakes, climbing trees, digging tunnels, and throwing dirt clods. Come Saturday night I turned the bath water brown and had to scrub the dirt from around my neck and knuckles with a brush.
We cleaned up for church. I am sure I was cute as all get-out when Mom clipped a bow tie on me. These were the days before churches were fragrance-free, so not only was I free of wild-boy stench, but Mom’s perfume and Dad’s Aqua Velva (sometimes Bay Rum) filled the air. During the week my brothers and I went our own ways, but on Sunday there we were all cleaned up together in the car (without seat belts) and then in a row on a wooden pew.
I grew up in church, so the tunes of the hymns were familiar before I learned the words. I often mumbled through the verses and sang the chorus with gusto. I especially liked the song “Whiter than Snow” which ended with “Now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” The dirty bathwater from the night before helped me sing this with certainty that my heart also needed washing.
I still need Jesus to wash away my sins. That Jesus makes me whiter than snow gives me even more joy now since I am closer to seeing Him. I am grateful for all the church-kid rhythms of Saturday bath and Sunday worship. I am grateful for the fragrance of Christ that filled my life because of a mother and father that loved Jesus. I am grateful for lilacs that bloomed outside the door of the little Nazarene church in Milton-Freewater even though the parsonage was tiny and white-board church hot in the summer.
We ate better on Sundays. Mom had mastered the pastor wife’s art of putting food on to cook so that it would be done when we got home. This was before crockpots, so it was often a roast in the oven. During the week we ate poor—at least economically (chicken necks, liver, meatloaf). Sunday was a feast day—often with mashed potatoes and gravy. We even put out a tablecloth. In all this there was the gentle glory of love’s labor.
I wish I could sing or dance all this. Words fall short. Teckla laughs when I dance, and that too gives me joy on a Sunday morning filled with light, blanketed with white
