Signing The Book

In our church, youth may choose to become a member after 16 years old, and today Monkey decided she was ready for this next step in her spiritual development.

Membership includes “signing the book” and making an annual monetary donation of any size.

It was especially meaningful for this to happen yesterday because Monkey has developed a loving and supportive relationship with our current minister, Reverend Carmen. From the very beginning of her time with us, Carmen recognized traces of herself in Monkey, which lead to an easy and comfortable connection for the two of them.

Next Sunday is Carmen’s final Sunday as our minister. She is moving to Florida and will begin a Hospice Chaplaincy in August. Not only are we so sorry to see her leave, once she goes there is a year of required “no contact,” which means she’ll miss many milestones in the life of our congregation and youth.

It meant a lot to Monkey to have Reverend Carmen be part of the ceremony when she signed the book.

So incredibly proud and grateful for this kiddo who listens and notices and cares about doing the right thing. She’s donated part of her allowance and on the way home from church she was asking how to set up an automatic recurring donation.

In addition to taking the big membership step yesterday, Monkey, with a little help from Buds, adapted and re-wrote the skit that the youth presented during the service yesterday.

The original skit was hitting all the wrong notes for her. (Boring for both the children and adults in the service; forced in its attempt to connect MLK Jr. and Unitarian Universalism in a way that centered UU’ism and whiteness, rather than MLK Jr’s words; and several “call and repeat sections” that felt disingenuous.)

Rather than just complain about the skit, or not take part, she volunteered to create a new skit that definitely improved on the previous.

It was a great weekend.