Call me ‘Madame Maxime’

This week my 5-year-old son and his almost 4-year-old cousin are attending Vacation Bible School at the country church where I grew up, from birth through 5^th grade. Around 1985, a disagreement among the parishioners prompted my parents to seek and find another fellowship, where we have been worshiping as a family ever since. But I bear no hard feelings toward my former church; this VBS is the first of the season; and it seems like a great start to the kids’ summer.

The one weird thing for me: I felt like a giantess walking into that teensy building! I’d swear it has shrunk to half the size it was a quarter-century ago.

Have you ever imagined being miraculously diminished in size so you could actually enter your dolls’ matchstick mansion? I felt a little like that—like I’d temporarily, mysteriously morphed into a person appropriately proportioned to fit into a world very familiar to me, but in a drastically altered context. I took a few minutes to wander around (it didn’t take long—it’s so small nowadays):

The wood-beamed sanctuary, which had seemed positively cavernous through my years-younger eyes, resembled a modest rec room to Grace the Giantess.

The maroon-carpeted foyer, where during Saturday morning choir practice my 7-year-old self could turn a dozen cartwheels from one end to the other, looked like an extra-wide hallway about the length of a bowling lane—not the Olympic arena it had been back then.

The Giantess visited the Ladies’ Room, reminiscing about the Sunday she thought she’d be really, really funny and latch the stalls from the inside and then crawl out underneath, leaving them locked for the next customers. No way could Grace pull off that prank now, even having shed 30 pounds in recent months—those toilets are too tiny!

I made my way through the Sunday school rooms where I’d learned my first Bible lessons; the church nursery where I’d been diapered and fed and entertained with songs and toys; the back hall where a group of men had carried in a Christmas tree and scraped my right cheek with pine branches as they brushed by me.

I returned to the foyer and saw, through the large window that divides the ‘arena’ from the sanctuary, my small son, beaming his beautiful, sincere smile. He rushed his cowboy boot-fitted feet from the front of the rec/worship room toward the swinging wooden doors that separate the spaces (doors not unlike those found in the Old West, except these are inlaid with cross-shaped glass windows). That’s when I snapped out of my fantasy and realized I was not Grace the child church-goer, somehow superimposed on this situation in a grown-up’s body.

I am me, now “Mommy.” And that is my boy. And there comes his cousin, my niece. I am the adult. This is my life. And because Providence has plunked me back in my hometown, I am blessed by these sometimes-surreal occasions to share the places and people of my youth with my progeny.