Lessons Learned

I was sitting at church today waiting for things to begin when I saw a group of children pass by our classroom. As they passed I noticed that one of them had her dress tucked into her panties, and that from the back her white underwear and some peek-a-boo cheek-a-boo were exposed for the entire Relief Society to see.

And then I realized that the little girl was my 5-year-old daughter, Sydney.

I might be weird, but when I was a teenager I had this perception of what my life would be like when I was a grown up--and a lot of the footage that played in my imagination was shot at church and involved my children sitting pressed and polished in the pews.

None of the movies that played in my head had my daughter wandering through church with her backside exposed. And yet there she was, preaching her own little sermon.

Luckily, those panties were as clean and white as Sunday itself.

I discovered in that moment that I prefer real life in all of its honesty to whatever plastic perceptions I had embraced when I was too young to know any better.

Thanks to Sydney for giving an excellent lesson at church today.