Well, after a year hiatus from molding the minds of the kids in our church, Dan and I are teaching a Sunday School class again, and this time, the stakes are a lot higher. Why? Because it's the junior high class, and I am scared they will make fun of me. Not because the kids are mean, but just because the mere phrase "junior high Sunday School" takes me back to my own junior high days. I had a pretty major lack of confidence at that point in my life, and for good reason, since I had glasses, braces and a crippling fear of speaking in public, even to answer questions in Sunday School.

The good news is that the kids in our class, all three of them, are really nice to me, and probably would even have been nice to my junior high self. The bad news is that the curriculum we have, while very easy to use and actually pretty insightful, has this laser-focus on making us discuss, to put it delicately, awkward concepts with the kids. I feel like they loaded the deck in favor of awkward by choosing to teach big portions of the early Old Testament. I never noticed it until I was required to explain it to impressionable youngsters, but some crazy stuff happens in the Old Testament, people. For example:

Abraham and Hagar: "Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so she said to Abram, "The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her." Genesis 16: 1, 2

That one made me want to conduct a quick poll of our students' parents before we got started to determine what the kids do and do not know about the birds and the bees, so to speak. If that answer to that turned out to be "not much" then I was thinking I would, without warning Dan, just change the subject of the lesson on the spot. "Today, kids, we'll be talking about ... ponies." Dan would just have to go along with it. I think part of what makes it awkward is that our church is small, and so it is not surprising that we taught all of these kids when they were in the little kids class, where we mostly did crafts and sang songs and did most certainly not discuss family planning customs of the ancient world. And then while I wasn't looking, they started growing up, and gluing popsicle sticks together no longer holds their attention.

But the week about Hagar pales in comparison to the next lesson, where we got to talk about the seal of the covenant between Abraham and God ... circumcision. And I kid you not, the writers of the curriculum suggested that if we wanted to, we could split the group up into guys and girls so that we could explain to them in a non-embarrassing context just exactly what circumcision entails. No, thank you! I think we'll just gloss right over that and move on, as my good Southern upbringing dictates.

This week, we talked about the story of Isaac and Rebekah and the practical application had to do with dating. We made the mistake of telling the kids that's what we would be discussing ahead of time, and based on the looks on their faces when we started, I think they thought we were going to bring them into the room and make them practice asking people out. So overall, I think they were relieved when we just stuck with the story and what it tells us about how God takes care of his people's lives, even down to details like who they marry. And I kind of thought it went well. Until Eli pulled out his list and I realized that for the most part, these kids would still rather die than be seen in public with a member of the opposite gender.

So far, Edie, who talked us into this in the first place, has not intervened to fire us, so I am assuming we have met my main goal, which is to avoid saying anything that makes anyone's parents have to re-explain the aforementioned birds and bees. But on the way home from church yesterday it occurred to me that, as impossible as it seems, one day Kate is going to be old enough that I need to talk to her about stuff like dating and relationships, and it isn't like that's going to be any less awkward just because it's my own kid. Probably more so, really. So I am thankful that people in our church are letting me practice on their kids. That is community for you.

Not that I won't totally understand if someone fires us. Next week they want us to do a skit. My junior high self is really freaked out about that.