Child's Play

By Sarah (Living Between the Lines)

This Christmas, I got—um, shall we say, drafted—to assist with a children’s Christmas program. This particular church only has about 15 children and they’re all below the age of six. A single, childless lady in her twenties volunteered to direct the program and found a play that was age-appropriate for these children. And she has spent the last several weeks herding cats attempting to direct this play. She got all of the parents to agree to help direct traffic to the stage, and on the stage. And she recruited another young childless friend of hers to help with the sets and costumes. And then, because nobody else would, she began learning lines so that she could also—in addition to directing—be the narrator of the play.

This woman was quite possibly the bravest—or most naïve—woman I have ever met.

Because I don’t regularly attend this church, I missed all of this pre-program fun. I missed the practices and the costume-making and the set-building. I just knew I needed to be there at 10:00 on that Sunday morning, to assist. By 10:03, I was ready to jump ship!

When I walked into the dressing room at 10:00, there were 15 children and at least as many adults. The oldest boy—wearing his costume—was standing on one side of the room bellowing, “WEE! WEE! WEE! WEE! WEE! WEE! WEE! WEE! WEE!” When I finally left the room twenty-five minutes later, he still hadn’t stopped. Both of his parents had been in the room and neither said anything to him.

One of the lovely little girls had been dressed that morning in the cutest little red velvet Christmas dress and white tights. When her mother began to take her dress off to put her costume on, I thought that surely a lion had gotten loose in the room and attacked her because never have I heard screaming such as that! And as I was recovering from that fright, another little girl—already in her costume—holding a toy dinosaur in each hand, came over to me, waited for me to crouch down to her level, and then ROARED in my face. Wait a second. I didn’t know there were plastic dinosaurs in Bethlehem 2000 years ago…

NOOOO! DON’T!

I turned quickly, just in time to watch one little angel attempt to hang his sister with his belt. When his mother called his name, he froze and looked at her innocently, while his sister proceeded to fall into the floor and play dead.

By the time the exhausted-looking adults trooped the bedraggled-looking children down the aisle and onto the stage, I’d already heard the rumor that nobody had learned their lines except the director/narrator. And so while 15 cranky, wiggly, giggly children stood in their places—some of them with parents standing near and occasionally putting a hand out to keep them from somersaulting off the stage—the narrator narrated the entire play and then led the children in singing “Away in a Manger.”

At the covered-dish luncheon that followed the service, the lady across from me made the comment, “They were so well-behaved!” All I could do was exchange knowing glances with the weary director/narrator and laugh.

Sarah Salter is a missionary and a writer who works in full time ministry. She believes that God has called her to be transparent and show the world Who He Is by letting them see how He works in her life. From that belief was born her little home on the web: Living Between the Lines. Sarah lives in Central North Carolina with her best friend: a sixty pound lap dog named Sadie.