By David Wilkinson
Forty-nine years ago my mother and I advanced to the second-grade Sunday school class together.
This year, on her 50th “Promotion Sunday,” Mom finally made it out of the second grade. It nearly broke her heart.
In 1961, during John F. Kennedy’s first summer in office, Mom agreed to teach second-graders (along with a few first- and third-graders) at Northwest Baptist Mission in Woodward, Okla., where Dad was pastor. I guess she figured if she could teach her firstborn, she could teach anyone.
Except for a few forays into teaching first-graders or “children’s church,” and several years teaching children of all ages at a community center in a low-income housing project, Mom devoted nearly a half-century to teaching Bible stories and the way of Jesus to second-graders.
At 78, after years of chronic arthritis, crippling back pain and debilitating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Mom finally left her class of seven-year-olds to join folks her own age on Sunday mornings.
For the first time in 50 years, she and Dad are now in the same Sunday school class. Dad, a retired minister of education, teaches a large class of senior adults at First Baptist Church of Muskogee, Okla. It’s a class full of characters. He joked that Mom was simply moving from one group of ornery children to another. But he knows this unwanted change is no laughing matter.
Dad is a great teacher, but he also knows that every Sunday morning between 9:30 and 10:30 Mom’s mind is bound to wander back to her beloved second-graders, gathered in another building.
At home, Mom now has a lot more free time. Gone is the happy routine of preparing for each week’s Sunday school lesson: reading the Bible passage multiple times, learning the memory verse, studying the teaching guide, gathering resource materials, and meeting on Wednesday evenings with the other teachers to develop lesson plans and learning activities, make assignments and, most importantly, to discuss and pray for the needs of the children and their families.
For many years, Mom made sure to visit each new class member during the week or two before Promotion Sunday. She remembers, in a very different era in America, spending one hot summer day visiting the homes of 19 or 20 incoming second-graders — and finding someone at home in every case.
For all these years, her favorite part of teaching has always been telling the Bible story. After saying the story aloud at home five or six times during the week, she would sit on Sunday morning in “large group” with the children around her, the Bible in her lap open to that week’s passage, to tell the Bible story in the language of second-graders.
Now, after some 2,500 weekly Bible stories; hundreds of home visits, phone calls and postcards; dozens of trips to “Sunday School Week” at Glorieta Baptist Conference Center in New Mexico; and countless prayers, Mom has quietly retired.
There are no awards, no fanfare, no applause. But the ripples of her life — and her love of children in Jesus’ name — have quietly touched the lives of hundreds, including children whose parents once sat in a semi-circle on Sunday mornings to hear Mrs. Wilkinson tell the Bible story.
They and I share something in common. We have heard God’s story told by a faithful Bible teacher. And we have seen the love of God in a mother’s eyes.