like Father, like Son

I taught Sunday School for the first time this week. I had taught Vacation Bible School several summers ago at my home church, and when I heard that my new contextual-leadership congregation, Galilee Lutheran, needed volunteers, I offered to teach the middle school class on alternating weeks.

First, some background: Sometime early in my career as a newspaper reporter, the critical eyes of readers really pushed me to new standards for my work — in terms of accuracy, honesty, grammar, style and what have you. And so my own critical eye became really intense, to the point that I would keep thinking about my articles even hours after I had filed them. And this trickled into pretty much everything else I've done, and everything I'm doing now as a seminary student (You wouldn't believe how long I spend even crafting e-mail messages to friends). I was a perfectionist to begin with, and now I have a real sense of pride and duty to go along with it.

So back to Sunday School. I spent a few hours preparing for Sunday's lesson. It seemed to me that if I had gotten so meticulous about everyday writing, I should really be careful when teaching kids about God. I had pretty big expectations. And when Sunday morning came, things went pretty well. I had four students ranging from sixth to eighth grade. All were pretty attentive and seemed to have a good time, but as I was putting away supplies in the closet afterward, I started to think about all the things I could have done better.

"I ran too long with the lesson and didn't give the kids enough time to apply it in the hands-on project!" "I didn't even get my point across at the end, that who they are reflects who Jesus is!" And so on.

I've come to realize that while pride in your work is a good thing, this sort of perfectionistic worrying usually isn't. And if I can't come to these sort of realizations on my own, I can learn a lot by looking at my parents' own habits. The worrying gene clearly comes from my mom's side of the family. The perfectionism gene comes from my dad, Don. (And since they'll probably read this, I'll say that I love them both very much, regardless of what quirky traits they passed on to me.)

I was talking to my dad on the phone a couple weeks ago. He was telling me about the article he wrote for the religion page of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, my hometown newspaper, where I worked for four years. Apparently one of my old copy editor buddies had lower-cased the words Father and Son in his column, and my dad was a little peeved. (Here's where I get to start paying back my dad for all the times he's told about my silly exploits in his sermons.) He figured people would think he was an idiot pastor if he didn't even know to give God and Jesus proper names.

Well, a few days later, I get an e-mail from a friend back in Wisconsin with the subject line, "Mad Props For Pastor Don." My friend told me that her church's board of education had used my dad's column (which called Sunday School teachers to keep God's love central to all their lessons) as the devotion for their meeting and was giving a copy of the article to all the teachers.

This made me laugh. My dad was being just like me. Instead of feeling good about the fact that his article would help some people as Sunday School teachers this year, he was beating himself up for the little things that went wrong with it. And while I teased him about it, I think this experience helped me a lot. It's much easier to see our own flaws when we see someone else doing the same thing. And it's pretty funny.

So back to the supply closet after Sunday School. After beating myself up for a few seconds about what could have gone better, I remembered my dad's experience and just shook my head and smiled. I did, after all, do a decent job on my first day teaching, the kids surely got something out of it (at least hopefully that God loves them), and I would have plenty of follow-up efforts to improve.

So, Dad, thanks. And if you ever do anything silly again, it's OK. I'll need plenty of sermon material in the years to come.