For you see, our children need us to be salt!  Children all around us need our light to shine on the dark parts of the world that would claim them for other gods!  Our children need us to reclaim our wild spirit that the world relentlessly tames, threatening to reduce our souls into domesticated complacency.  Children all around us need us to be light, showing the way to the fullness of the reign of God.

For the vision that God has for us- that new creation that God is bringing into being for us and for our children -- is a wild & courageous one!  It is a life lived without hate and contempt; a life free of fear, gossip and vengeful, calculated, retaliation.  What our children can and must learn here is to live life with a commitment to something bigger than ourselves-life lived for 'the other', the stranger, and the outsider-lives lived for the one the world would reject and condemn and isolate.

Maybe, just maybe, with all the St. Thomas' souls that have gone before us, with all the souls here in the now, and the ones that have yet to find our doors, we can make this difference, that our children will not learn hate--not in this place!  And that our adult leanings towards hate may be healed!

John, thank you for being teacher full of wisdom and light- and laughter and tears and joy.  Thank you for planting and watering, so that God can grow up a generation of children incapable of hatred, because they have become children of the light.  Thank you for all your years of Godly Play in our midst, and for helping each of us to know more about being true children of God.