Sunday Church

Where I met my childhood best friends and learned friendship with Jesus and married my soulmate and brought my baby to grow up

I claim that I grew up in the old Baptist church down the street from my house, the one with tall stained glass windows and no middle aisle. I didn’t really start attending until I was in the sixth grade, and even then, I only came on Wednesday nights for youth group. I had spent my childhood in a church on the outskirts of town, the kind of church with stackable chairs instead of wooden pews. My dad was the pianist, and we always sat on that side of the sanctuary, singing newer hymns, or at least, newer than the Heavenly Highways hymnals at my Granny and Papaw’s country church an hour down the road. The sanctuary there was huge, the kind that was cleared out and transformed into Jerusalem in the summertime for Vacation Bible School. I remember the Sunday school classrooms, which I hated because all I ever wanted to do Sunday mornings was stay with my mom. Once I was old enough for youth group, I only ever remember going one time. The room was upstairs and painted black with splatters of neon, old couches pushed up against the walls. There was nothing wrong with that youth group, other than the fact I just didn’t feel at home. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I used whichever parent’s cellphone they let me borrow to call the other parent and request they come pick me up immediately.

Around that same time, two very pivotal things happened in my life: first, my mom, a real estate agent at the time, met Jimmy and Micah, the new youth minister and his wife at the old Baptist church, while showing them houses, and second, I became friends with two boys in school named Jack and Nick, both of whom attended said church together. Somehow, one thing led to another, and I ended up going to VBS that summer at First Baptist, the summer before the sixth graders moved up to youth group. Our group was me, Jack, Nick, and a few other students, led by Jimmy and joined by an older youth group member named Mary. And really, as I write this, nearly fifteen years later, I genuinely cannot remember any other moment at any other church except ours after that week.

My parents so generously decided to move our membership to First Baptist not too long after that, leaving a church home they loved, where my dad was a deacon and their Sunday school class was filled with cherished friends. As a mother now, I see especially the importance of their decision in this though, in choosing to foster their babies’ love for church and community. The morning we joined, I remember the sound of the air conditioning blowing, the choir singing “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling…calling for you and for me.” I love that church and have since the day I stepped in it.

For the next five years I spent in youth group, Jack and Nick became my very best friends. I never skipped a Wednesday night or a Sunday night homegroup. I sang in the youth choir, not as enjoyable but still an excuse to be with my friends. I spent every spring break in white church vans, running backyard Bible clubs right outside of Arlington, Texas, every summer, spent a week on a mission trip to wherever Jimmy had planned that year. My memories of high school are so consumed with memories of standing in the church parking lot after Wednesday night services, lit by Jack’s car where his sister sat waiting for us to be done talking, spending hours laughing and wasting time, all of us together.

When I went to college, just a two minute walk down the road, I still, for the most part, met my parents on Sunday mornings in their pew for church. My freshman year, I tried a few contemporary churches out of town with my new college friends, churches with lights and sound systems and livestreamed sermons. But I always just missed the creamy white hymnals, the sound of that air conditioning, the green carpet and blue cushions on creaky pews. Around that time, Jimmy was called up to be the head pastor, the most golden of pastors I’ve ever known next to my Papaw. Four years later, he was who married Price and me, and four more years later it’s him who preaches Sunday morning sermons still.

When I moved an hour away after graduation for a brief stint in magazine publishing that I of course assumed would be longer, the pandemic was fully fledged, and the thought of finding a church while masked and alone, just Price and me, was overwhelming. Two years went by, and we’d only ever visited one, the biggest church service I’d ever attended, with a lobby that felt like an airport terminal. I remember us going for pizza with Price’s sister afterwards, the three of us in agreement that we would not be trying that one again. Church became slow Sunday mornings, written prayers in my journal.

When Price and I moved back to my hometown, it felt like a sigh of relief. I felt such immense relief to wear my church clothes again and sit by my parents on our pew again and listen to Jimmy again and eat at the busiest Mexican restaurant afterwards again.

Then the last few weeks of my pregnancy with Kit came, and it felt as if the church had the boiler on every Sunday morning, and I physically could not go, which is comical but true, especially for those who know me. And then my baby was born, a piece of my body on the outside, and the thought of sharing her made me, and still does, feel like I could fight. The Sunday after the Fourth of July was our first morning back to church, with my baby strapped to my chest as I stood in the back of the sanctuary and rocked her to sleep, listening to the choir, listening to Jimmy, watching the backs of heads I’d known for years and years and years.

I’ve struggled with the nursery ever since then, this concept of dropping your baby off to whoever is on nursery shift that week, despite the fact I’ve never left her but a handful of times, and with our mothers no less. And so I started going to nursery with her, spending my Sunday mornings on the floor, talking to the sweet ladies on duty, these sweet, sweet ladies who never questioned me or asked me to leave. Sadly, the thought of leaving her has never gotten any easier with time, even as other moms told me it’s easier the earlier you do it.

But then a few Sundays ago, I woke up and told myself I had to. I had prayed the night before for bravery and strength, for Kit and myself, for God to place someone in that room to care for her. I dressed her in a little denim jumper and tennis shoes, brushed her hair and packed a pouch of diapers, asking them to call if she needed changing. The nursery was quiet when I got there, and one of the kindest ladies I know stayed with her while I snuck out, ducking as I passed the rows of windows in the case Kit looked up.

And that was it. I couldn’t go back. I shuffled into our pew, quiet and anxiously holding my phone in case they texted me, willing Jimmy to preach as fast as he could so I could go get my baby back.

So goes every Sunday. Every morning as we scramble to get ready, always in need of more time regardless of what time we wake up, I have a pit in my stomach at the thought of leaving her, ready to pull the card of let’s just stay home at any moment. But I iron her dresses anyways, brushing her hair and folding her pretty socks down on her church shoes. Price drops me off at the door closest to the nursery, and I sneak away. Every Saturday night, during our bedtime prayers, I pray over my sleepy baby for nursery. And while I’m not sure she’s getting much better, the cries following me down the hallway until I reach the sanctuary, I know she will.

I was thinking about this all a few Sundays ago, as my mind trailed off to thinking about her and not following the service, watching the clock to see how much longer until I could go get her. I thought about how many versions of myself has sat through church in this very place…thirteen and awkward, seventeen and barefoot, my heels kicked off so I wouldn’t bring attention to my height on the second row, twenty and entirely too confident, twenty-two in a white dress and a veil over my tear-stained face. And now a version of myself exists in a tiny, tiny body down the hall, apparently toddling through the hallways with teary eyes, the nursery ladies chasing her around for an hour. I thought about Jack and Nick, our youth group, and how I so desperately long for their presence here with me again, for our babies to grow up together. I thought about how jealous I used to be of my friends who got to spend their entire childhood in this church, how special that must have been. But then I thought, Kit…she will have that. And that is the thought that is helping me leave my baby in the nursery on Sunday mornings, this promised answered prayer I know God will give me of a baby who grows up to love church, who grows up knowing her mother loves this place because of those years I spent here as a child and now, my child is here, too.

It feels different now, Sunday mornings in the pews, then it did when I was sixteen, filed in next to my teenage friends. I’m distracted and thinking about my baby and pregnant and still convinced the air conditioning doesn’t work as well as it once did. But we’re there, in this place my whole life seemingly has revolved around, where I met my childhood best friends and learned friendship with Jesus and married my soulmate and brought my baby to grow up.