Blessed Sunday

It was just Julianna and I at church this morning. Well, not just us. There were a few hundred other people, but just the two of us from our family. We sat, us two girls, in our regular seat. She with her books and a bag of pretzels. Me with a Bible and a pink stuffed dragon. (The dragon was hers, too, but I got to hold it for awhile.) For most of the service, Julianna sat on my lap. She got up and down a few times, but mostly she sat with me. And most of the time that she sat with me she was wiggling and squiggling and putting her feet on the seat in front of me and twisting to whisper observations to me. She reached for her pretzel bag and turned pages in my Bible and almost made me spill the communion tray. But I did not make her sit beside me in the long pew. I did not make her get off my lap. Because the one time I thought about asking her to move, I thought of Josh and Adam. My two little boys who used to sit on my lap at church. Now they are as tall as me and are no longer those little boys who wiggled and squirmed there not so many years ago. Jules will be four in a few short weeks and I know from experience than in the blink of an eye, she will be sitting across the auditorium with her friends in the youth group. But for today, and for as many more as she will, she sat on my lap. And I treasured it in my heart for those days when she doesn't.