Pterosaurs and Fatherly Development

So it happened to me during the Easter Sunday worship service in my 39th year of life! Some fatherly instinct kicked in just as the service got underway. Tristan and I sat midway back on the left side of the sanctuary. He grabbed the bulletin and began marking the pages in the hymnal for each song in the service. This had become a little of routine over the last year, not so much to help me find my way through the service as it was to mark the progress of time until he was released to freely run through the church. Its not that he does not pay attention in worship as he often repeats back to me main themes and phrases from the sermon on our way home but he is 9 and his youth worship receptors must be located all over his body. I think this because he roles around in the pew, moving in multiple directions at once apparently to better “be in tune with God,” so he tells me. He often moves to the music in a way that distracts every bone in my fatherly body. He often creates things in his mind as well as with any physical object he can get his hands on.

On this Easter Sunday, during the most quiet moments of the pastoral prayer, with my head bowed and my eyes mostly closed I caught a flicker out of that part of my eye that was not closed. Then the sound of flapping paper, which seemed more like the loudest noise maker every made. As I looked over to Tristan he was animating what I learned later was his version of a large pterosaur. In that moment, I lightly touched him on the knee and gave him that fatherly look of “Please stop doing that so other people will stop looking at me and thinking that I should be controlling my child more particularly during the quiet moments of the prayer.” Ok it’s a very complex look but he knows it well.

The worship moved on but my mind was still back at that moment of the flapping pterosaur. The Choir began to sing and I began to figure out how I was going to nonverbally communicate to my son that what he was doing was so sacrilegious. Just then, out of my other eye, I saw a father 3 rows up nervously watching his 2 younger daughters dancing in the isle to the rhythm of the choir’s anthem. Then, I saw the grandmother sitting next to the father, put her hand on his shoulder and whisper something in his ear. Whatever she said caused him to relax his body. Then I noticed that many in the choir were smiling while they were singing, seemingly rejoicing that these two young girls were acting out the excitement and joy of Easter that they, as the choir, were hoping we in the congregation would experience. And you know what, we did, thanks to those two young girls dancing in the isle.
So what happened? Well at 39 it seems that this way cool, laid back, casual acting, youth minister kind of dad was about to give my son a signal that making the flapping sounds of a pterosaur during the morning prayer was sacrilegious. The only good news for me is that I did not, well at least not totally and I learned from a friend that eventually dads grow out of this stage when they become grandfathers… Happy Easter…