First Days

Justin Roberts is something of a family member in our household. His kids-themed songs set to creative rock-folk music weave their way into our collective mind daily. My mom says we should listen to more classical, and I agree, but I know that Dietrich and Elliott find comfort (and entertainment, but these days have been about comfort) in this music and its quirky rhythms. Yesterday on our way to the first day of school, the boys were silent, staring out the windows, as we made our way through Pop Fly, a CD named for a song about a kid stuck in the outfield and interested in just about everything besides playing baseball. Then Elliott asked, "Can we have track 9?"

I knew track 9 would be coming, as I knew it would from the first time I heard it last winter. Then, we were deciding whether to home-school, enroll in the local public school, or search for a half-day play-based school. The actual first day seemed far away. Track 9 is a song about a child's first day at school and how he has "giant-sized butterflies on that first day". Then the song turns to what his mom says, a turn I hadn't thought of, but that makes the experience real for parents who have years of padding between a first day of school and our lives now. We might vaguely remember what it was like to go to a new school, or start Kindergarten, and I know I still get butterflies when I've started a new job, or get up to preach, or hear the starting buzzer at a triatlhon.

But as parents what has changed our lives forever is the first day our kids, our babes-in-arms, came into the world with us. The song has the mom telling her child of his parents' butterflies on the day he was born. How they wished they could have a magic shell that would protect them as they held their new baby, how she wished he could have one for his first day of school. But the giant-sized butterflies she had on his first day in the world, and the ones he was feeling now as she opened the back seat door (and no doubt, she was feeling them, too!) are there to remind him that everything is going to be alright. They are big, strong, feelings, but they are powerful and are there to help us.

In the Moravian church there are scripture passages randomly selected for each day of the year on a three-year cycle. A second text is selected to accompany the first, usually chosen by a clergy member. Today's text are giant-sized butterflies for me, reminding me that in this small spot in the world where my life, my boys' lives, our family's life is subtly changing, God is here, in the midst of the butterflies:

The Lord is with me as a mighty, awesome one. Jeremiah 20:11 (NKJV)

John wrote: I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me
a loud voice like a trumpet saying, 'Do not be afraid; I am the first
and the last, and the living one.' Revelation 1:10,17-18