“Look, there’s our Sunday School teacher’s name,” Howard pointed out to me when we visited a community wellness center recently. Sure enough, there was a familiar name engraved on a bronze plaque as vice-president of the organization that included facilities like the lovely pool where I’d gone for some water therapy for my knee.
Our teacher, a native American, whom we had come to know slightly when we started attending this church recently, was a mixture of the stern and affable, a man of quiet demeanor who came alive when he was teaching. Yesterday we ended up at the same lunch table eating out after church. Another friend who was present said, “Not only is his name on a plaque at the bank, and several other places around town, it’s also on a plaque at the Smithsonian!”
Well, I knew he was prominent, I just didn’t realize how much so. He quietly explained that a vote had been taken among the Kaw leaders, and he had been selected as one among several others to represent their council at the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian. Wow! Quite a distinction! Turns out his name is also on a plaque in the church foyer as National Sunday School Teacher of the Year!
Our phone had rung yesterday with the plaintive voice of a young girl from church that I had been befriending, giving us a tearful prayer request. The church she used to attend was closing, and she was heartbroken. When they received prayer requests last night, I asked her if she was going to give her request. She shook her head and said she was going to wait until they called people up for special prayer. Hearts were touched as this ingenuous child stood at the altar, along with another young teenager whose father was gravely ill.
I could see I was not the only one she had her disarming effect on, when at the conclusion of the service, I saw a visitor turn to my young friend, and taking a pretty locket from her own neck, she gave it to the young girl, gently putting it around her neck. “I want you to have this,” she said, speaking some other words I couldn’t hear.
True humility is rare, though not as rare in children as in adults. Jesus said, “For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” I had seen an example in both young and old that day.
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