Thankful Notes: Sunday Defication

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Thankful Notes

Today is my big work day. It started early, just me and Camper heading out for the store and Starbucks and then the church. We would be staying through the end of the evening, so I was hauling clothing and dog supplies for our 13 hour non-stop day.

Because my day was long and I am only now just sitting down, I won’t write much at all—but I will share this one story…

On Friday, our friend Julie took her nephew Jayden, whom she has raised since he was born, to the courthouse. It was adoption day. After so much time and a roller coaster of challenges, it was finally legal.

Yesterday, we went to a party celebrating Jayden’s adoption. And today at church it was Jayden’s dedication.

At our church, we will never do mass assembly-line dedications or baptisms because we want to take time to pause and celebrate individuals, share their stories, and let that moment be about them.

So today we took time with Julie and her family and little Jayden. It was tender and sweet and holy and good.

We had a little something extra planned for them—because of the special weekend with his legal adoption… there would be flowers for Julie and a big teddy bear for Jayden, to be brought up by her friend Leslie.

After the words shared and the prayer given over Jayden and Julie, we stood there on stage and smiled as Jayden pointed to his pictures on the big screens and said, “Look Mommy, Jayden!”

And then Leslie came up with the flowers and the teddy bear and she gave Julie a big hug. Before she left the stage, I asked her to take the microphone and explain why she was up there. Through tears, Leslie explained how some time ago, she had been on the prayer team on a Sunday morning at church, and this lady Julie came forward asking for prayer about Jayden’s adoption. Leslie prayed with her, and wrote down the prayer request in her journal so she could continue praying for Julie and Jayden, and went on to become friends with Julie.

Leslie explained how meaningful this day was to her—celebrating with her friend the legal adoption of Jayden, the answering of a prayer.

It was definitely my favorite part of the church service today. It seems to me that it’s the kind of stuff Jesus is all about… Let the children come, for the Kingdom looks like this.

Later that morning after the service, our preschool director asked me if I heard what Jayden had told his teacher and classmates after his dedication. I hadn’t, so she told me…

Jayden said to his class, “Jesus gave me this teddy bear.”

The sweetest words. The faith of a child.

Simply wonderful.

In between this and the next big thing of the day, I looked through the pictures we had taken of Jayden’s dedication. There were about 60 to choose from. I wanted to get them posted in an album on the church Facebook page, so I selected about 25 and quickly wrote the title: Jayden Cantrell’s Dedication.

At least that’s what I thought I wrote.

A few minutes later, my phone was blowing up with messages, like, “Um, you might want to change that.”

My heart raced. What had happened?

Someone sent me a screenshot of the post. And it didn’t exactly say Dedication.

Instead, I must have hit the key next to the D which is the F and so the word came out as Defication (which is a misspelling of defecation but still clearly reads the same).

Ugh.

Thankfully one of the other Facebook page managers had corrected it with lightning speed, so this embarrassing typo was not seen by everyone (I hope).