Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Preach the Word, Sister

Turns out Ellie gets a lot more out of church than we realized.

In the car after church on Sunday, she announced that as soon as we got home she was going over to Mavis’s house. Mavis, which is not her real name but sounds good on my blog, is our next-door neighbor. She and her sister LaVern moved in right after we did, so Ellie’s known them all her life. We fondly refer to them as our cat-lady neighbors, not because they’re crazy like cat ladies (because they’re not) but simply because they do have a lot of cats.

However, we don’t normally just go visit them at random, so we knew something was up.

Apparently in Ellie’s class at church they talked about being missionaries. I can only guess that her wonderful teachers probably suggested that friends and neighbors would be the perfect starting place for these little budding missionaries, not even expecting anything beyond the word missionary to make it out the door (and thinking they’d be lucky to even get that.) But Ellie is a funny little duck. The things you’d really like her to remember are gone in a second, and anything you assume she’ll forget will probably be remembered for eternity.

And she was one determined little duck. Not wanting to crush her missionary hopes, but slightly fearful of causing awkwardness in our otherwise comfortable neighborly relationship, we tried to discourage her from running over straightaway. We said we’d discuss at dinner how our family could best be missionaries. We made other, less awkward suggestions.

We thought we'd redirected her fervor, but we were fools.

After dinner the girls went outside to enjoy the rare sunshine. Chris and I holed up with books in an unusually quiet house. We learned later that Ellie marched herself right up to Mavis and LaVern’s door, knocked, and when LaVern opened up, said, “Hi! Do you need any help learning more about the Gospel?”

LaVern said, thank you, no, she was just fine, but would Ellie like to pet the cat?

At some point I will have to go next door myself and explain, but I think no harm was done. Even so-called cat ladies have a sense of humor.

5 comments:

  1. AWEsome. I'm told that fear is an excellent motivator. Perhaps you could help her weave a bit of it into her next door approach :-)

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  2. LaVern and Mavis. Good choice on the pseudo-namesThey sound like EXCELLENT ladies. :)

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  3. Mike, see the post below about Satan. She will happily spend all day telling people about him and his wily ways. No worries on the fear front. She's got it covered.

    Carrie, I knew you'd appreciate those names! Long live the Buddinghams :)

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  4. That makes me laugh so hard. I'm sure those ladies just laughed and laughed!

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  5. So cute! And good for you, now you have the perfect opportunity set right up for you.

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Will blog for comments

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