Joy & Resilience.
Andrew cautiously walked toward Arcade Church’s first and second grade Sunday School class, haunted by upsetting memories from a previous church experience. Waiting to welcome young Andrew, however, was the smiling face and gentle greeting of Paula Friederichs, the class’ longtime teacher. Andrew, who later in life would become a pastor at Arcade, was so powerfully comforted by Ms. Paula’s kind presence that he still tells the story of this healing encounter today. Such a mundane-yet-influential moment would play out many more times for children like Andrew, as Paula and her husband, with no biological children of their own, invested thirty-five years into the spiritual upbringing of their church’s next generation.
Skits with elaborate sets; immersive lessons drawn from personal study of Scripture—these were the hallmarks of Paula’s Sunday School class. “We were a little old fashioned,” she admits, explaining how they still sang around a piano when other classes were adopting music videos. Some of the children’s parents we taught in later years were actually children we had taught twenty-five years earlier. They would remember the music, dressing up in costumes, acting out the skits.” While Paula and her team’s methods may have been from a previous generation, their impact reaches into the next one, impacting an entire community of parents and children.
“This Bible,” Paula says of the one she recently had restored, “represents the last twelve years of my life.” That decade, especially the past several years, have been marked by two significant losses for Paula—her beloved Sunday School class and her ninety-seven-year-old mother. First her class temporarily paused, as the world shutdown during the Covid pandemic. But even as churches started to gather again, Paula couldn’t return with the others because her mother, who now suffered from vascular dementia, required 24-7 care. Mourning the loss of “normal” life, Paula used the time she had before her mother woke each morning to study her Bible. “Now with my mother gone,” she explains, “there’s sentimental value that this was the Bible encouraging me when she needed my help.”
Final days spent caring for her mother; decades spent spiritually caring for others’ children. These are the memories, the irreplaceable connections, tied to Paula’s personal Bible. Seeing the notes, underlines, and highlights etched on each page takes her back to the hours spent preparing for weekly lessons, the quiet mornings reading Isaiah while her declining mother slept. “Joy and resilience,” she says, “would be the themes of this past decade. My class was a joy. And taking care of my mother,” she adds, “was hard, but it was still a joy.” Motherless and class-less, Paula now enters an unfamiliar season in 2023—but she’s entering it with a familiar friend, one who can keep her joyful and resilient for whatever lies ahead.
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