Well, it has turned out that he’s not discriminating in regards to who or when he does the talking. When we go shopping, he asks the sales clerks if they have Lego Star Wars for the Wii and then he proceeds to tell them everything he is doing in the game. At church, during the time when we greet people around us, Ethan pops up out of his chair and says hello to as many people as he can before the time is up. Our church also has a children’s story time before the kids go to their children’s church class. Audrey insists that I go up with her. Ethan flies out of his seat and runs down the aisle to get close to the teacher or to seat by Ethan T.O.E (The Other Ethan). I end up with a front row seat to hear the children’s story and my son’s response. He has spoken up so many times now that I don’t even remember all the times he’s said something that caused the congregation to howl in laughter.

I was just asking Nathan if he remembered some. Ethan usually answers the rhetorical questions. In last week’s story about eagles, the storyteller asked if they would like to be like an eagle, and he said “No, they have to eat worms!” and then he stayed on stage after all the kids left and told the storyteller what was great about being an eagle (you can see storms coming from a long way off). Today, the storyteller (Emery, our pastor’s wife) was talking about Palm Sunday. She said it was the week before Easter. Ethan waved his hand in the air and said, “You know what’s great about Easter? I get to go see Nana and Grandpa. . .” at this point Emery told Ethan that he could tell her the rest later. She was very sweet and gracious so Ethan didn’t feel bad. Meanwhile, Nathan is back in his seat and telling one of the parents near him that he’s terrified of what Ethan will say every time he goes up there.

The beautiful ending to today’s escapade happened as I went to pick up Ethan and Audrey from children’s church. I was gathering the kids when I heard one of the teachers say, “I want to meet Ethan’s mom.” Oh dear. Fear struck my heart. He came over and said, “I’ll be praying for you.”

(Here’s a picture of Ethan striking up a conversation with a random stranger as we waited for lunch one day.)

“Daddy, you have two choices. You can give me raisins or you can not give me raisins (Ethan had just finished eating all the raisins out of his Raisin Bran).”

Daddy says, “I’m not going to give you anymore raisins.”

Ethan replies, “That was not a good choice.”

You can upload documents to this site to have sent to pre-selected email recipients in the event that the rapture occurs. So, you ask, do they have non-believers running the site to push the “red button” when Jesus comes back? Nope.

In their own words:

We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses
you provide, 6 days after the “Rapture” of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our
5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period.
Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the
system.

What if they all just happen to lose internet or something else keeps them from their computers? And what if they weren’t truly believers and the rapture happens and they miss it. . .