Safe and Cherished Fall Thoughts

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It's that time of year again. Backpacks have been purchased. New shoes are being broken in. School supplies are disappearing in stores leaving shelves empty. Teachers are preparing classrooms, lesson plans, bulletin boards, and approximately 700 other things that nobody outside education fully understands.

School starts today for our district! Wahoo!

With all of this, a first for me: after years of serving churches that rented space to preschools — where every one of those small, sticky-handed kiddos still somehow knew me as "Pastor Laura" in the hallway — I get to actually be the pastor of a church-owned preschool. Our amazing director has asked me to lead fifteen minutes of chapel with the kids every Wednesday, and I am so excited I can hardly stand it.

Fifteen minutes. Once a week. It doesn't sound like much. But as I've been pondering what those fifteen minutes should hold, I keep landing on the same conviction: my most important job in that room is to help these children know, in their bones, that God wants them to be safe and cherished.

My mom was a preschool teacher at a UMC preschool. My sister-in-law is an incredible in-the-trenches TK teacher out in California, the kind of teacher who shows up every day for kids who need her most. Preschool ministry is in my blood, you might say.

And because I am a person who apparently cannot think about anything without researching it to death, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. I started brushing up on the world of preschool characters, television shows, and children's programming.

This required some cultural recalibration.

Our house currently lives in a world of inappropriate-for-young-children musicals, Marvel movies, Stephen King novels, and jump-scare movies. My children loved Sofia the First, Doc McStuffins, Dinosaur Train, PAW Patrol, Masha and the Bear, Wild Kratts, and Daniel Tiger.

Thankfully, some of those still exist.

Whew.

I was especially curious about Ms. Rachel. I have, of course, heard of her. I haven't been hiding under a rock. But I started paying more attention because of some of the controversy surrounding her — particularly her public support for LGBTQIA+ people and her concern for children affected by war, including children in Gaza.

What struck me most was how much of the criticism seemed to center around something that should be profoundly uncontroversial: she believes children should be safe and cherished.

I came across Christian voices calling Ms. Rachel dangerous. Some have gone so far as to call her demonic. Parents are being warned to stay away from her because, supposedly, she is indoctrinating children.

And I found myself asking: what, exactly, has this dangerous woman done?

She calls herself a Christian. She supports, celebrates, and loves LGBTQIA+ people. She speaks up for children who are suffering. And much of what she does seems to revolve around reminding children that they are loved, valued, safe, and cherished.

Again: safe and cherished. Shouldn't that be the standard? Safe and cherished is not demonic.

I sat with that for a while.

I understand the theological concern underneath the accusation. Christians have long recognized that evil doesn't always announce itself as evil — that harm can disguise itself as goodness, and that wisdom requires paying attention to the fruit something produces. A wolf in sheep's clothing is a real category. There are places where something that looks like safety or concern turns out to be a mirage.

But I think we have to be careful about what we're calling a disguise.

If someone says, children should be safe, children should be cherished, children should not be harmed by war, LGBTQIA+ children and families deserve dignity and love — our first response shouldn't be suspicion or demonization just because we disagree with some piece of that person's theology or identity. We can ask questions. We can discern. We can disagree. Christians aren't called to abandon discernment.

But discernment is not the same thing as suspicion.

And this is where I keep coming back to Jesus, and to Paul on fruit. If something really is a wolf in sheep's clothing, the fruit should eventually tell us so. Is it producing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? Or is it producing fear, contempt, cruelty, exclusion, hatred?

Sometimes evil really does hide behind a beautiful disguise. But sometimes we mistake the sheep for a wolf simply because we've been taught that certain people, certain identities, certain kinds of welcome, are dangerous.

Here's what worries me. When we teach children to associate LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and marginalized folks with danger — with demons, even — we aren't protecting them. We're forming them. We're handing them a lens before they've had the chance to meet the person that lens is aimed at.

What happens when the child they've been taught to fear sits down beside them at school? Did we teach them to see a neighbor? Or did we teach them to see a spiritual threat?

That distinction matters. Christians cannot manufacture prejudice on Sunday and then act mystified and surprised by bullying on Monday. That's not mystery.

I look at Paul's list again — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — and then I look at a woman telling scared, grieving, war-weary children that they are safe and cherished, and I cannot, for the life of me, find the wolf in it.

What I find is fruit.

So this is what I'm carrying into that little chapel room this fall.

I don't need fifteen minutes to make a theological argument. Three- and four-year-olds don't need my footnotes on Paul, and they certainly don't need to hear about the internet's opinion of Ms. Rachel. What they need is what my mom gave a classroom of them for years. What my sister-in-law gives hers every single day out in California, one snack time and one band aid over a skinned knee and one circle-time song at a time. What Daniel Tiger sings in a hundred different ways: you are enough, just as you are.

So on Wednesdays, I'm going to say it plainly, in words small enough for small people to keep: God made you. God loves you. You are safe here, and you are cherished here — not because of anything you did, just because you're you.

That's the whole sermon, really. It always has been. I just usually need more than fifteen minutes and a room full of Bibles to remember it.

Turns out I needed was a room full of four-year-olds to say it to over and again: you are safe and cherished.