I am, for so many good reasons, an avid basketball fan. I am, for obvious reasons, a Dallas Mavericks fan. I will definitely be cheering for the Mavs from Frisco tonight at 6 p.m. as they play Round 3, Game 5, at the Chase Center in San Francisco, California.

Today, however, I line up with Coach Kerr for the Warriors, Coach Kidd agreeing. Kerr was visibly shaken and on the verge of tears at times, when he said before Tuesday night’s game 4 with the Mavs, “I’m not going to talk about basketball. Nothing’s happened with our team in the last six hours. Any basketball questions don’t matter … [19 children and 2 teachers] were killed since our last shootaround … When are we going to do something? … Enough!” 

Another basketball coach suggested that we have to examine our way of thinking and of being, of deciding what we value, our privilege, our lack of community; those things, he said, are a perfect cocktail for destroying lives.

I was thinking about all of the above when I arrived for our Weekday Program’s Preschool graduation here at FUMC Plano yesterday morning. I had just wound through the school’s halls among teachers and children and 31 euphoric graduates of our preschool.  I then walked with our director Jessica White into a full chapel to offer words of welcome and a prayer. As I looked out into the eyes of so many parents and grandparents, I saw it:  the both/and – super excited and proud; and, like Adam at the beginning of Genesis, naked and afraid. How is it possible, even imaginable, that families of preschoolers would be afraid for their children within the walls of a church, a school, a grocery store?

As our graduating class of 2022 preschoolers received their certificates and Bibles, Jessica announced who they hoped to be in this world – a veterinarian, a teacher, a doctor, an architect, a police officer, a fire fighter. I was standing in the wings of the chapel in front of our youth minister Sarah Henson, and I whispered a quiet prayer, “Please, God, may they grow up to be all those.  Please, God, may they all grow up.” 

 Grateful to be in ministry with you,

 Judith