A Sunday School Drop-Out Spared

My parents tend to worry – a lot. Kidnapping, hostage-taking, teen pregnancy, drugs, drunk driving – you name a problem; my parents have considered how to keep it from happening to their kids.

There’s only one thing my parents never worried about when it came to me and that had to do with joining a cult. Their theory? “You had so much trouble with conventional religion; we never really figured you’d fall for some extreme splinter group.”

I guess there’s at least one plus to raising a natural skeptic.

My parents both taught Sunday school when I was growing up. My father taught kindergarten, and my mother usually taught sixth grade.

Through what I will claim is no fault of my own, I tended to be a troublemaker in Sunday school class. It’s not that I ever meant to get in trouble; I just like to ask a lot of questions. (Outside of Sunday school, my mother and I spent many hours in the library researching my various topics of interest from why ostriches liked to stick their heads in the sand, how an egg develops and the growth of asparagus.)  Curiosity, neurotic-ism or annoyance? You decide.

Wikipedia and IMDB have been Godsends in my adult life.

Long before I knew the difference between evolution and creationism, when one of my Sunday school teachers went over Genesis, I had to ask why she seemed to be in direct conflict with my science teacher. “If the Earth was created in six days, what about the dinosaurs?” I said.

Mrs. Johnson, my science teacher at the time, had explained that dinosaurs roamed the Earth with no humans, and I really didn’t see where Adam and Eve fit in on this time frame.

Then, there was the day our Sunday school teacher came in to explain that “We were all adopted because we were all God’s children, and He had given us to our parents on loan.” (The “on loan” might not be a direct quote, but I promise that that Sunday school teacher was not particularly eloquent.)

I think I started the crying that day, but I know a lot of other kids eventually joined in. I think adoption is lovely, but as a kid who feared learning she was one day adopted, breaking the news this way seemed insensitive to say the least.   

I also did not know how much I would upset my first grade Sunday school teacher when I answered the question, “What’s the last movie you all saw?” with “Aliens.” My mom had been out of town, and it was true. I’m sorry she only wanted Disney answers.

Eventually, my Sunday school teachers seemed really tired of my questions, and it could be hard to get them to notice my raised hand, but I’m not one to give up easily.

“Would King Herod really have cut the baby in half? What if none of the moms said anything?”

“How could you really have all of your power in your hair?”

“Wouldn’t the whale’s stomach acid be a problem for Jonah?”

“Just going from Saul to Paul doesn’t seem like a real earth-shattering name change. Wouldn’t Joe or Sam have been more dramatic?”

Apart from making my class the Bible Trivia champion of 1980-something, I was not an asset to most Sunday school classes. (I actually had to share that title with another Sunday school class, a decision I contested and still consider to be an unfair ruling, but the journey to move on continues.)

I don’t know whether or not it was discussed during some sort of Sunday school teacher conference, but from fourth grade on, I spent three years in my mother’s Sunday school class. She was used to my questions, and I imagine my departure from the regular course of Methodist teachings was a relief to many.

So, this Mother’s Day, I’d like to thank my mom for putting up with a lot – from the struggle to define infinity for me to typing up the school newspaper my third grade class dreamed up one day. But, I suppose that most of all, I’d like to thank her for taking me in when no one else was eager to, listening to and trying to find answers to my questions and never making me feel like I was the weird one for going against the flow.

Happy Mother’s Day Mama! I love you!