A Blast From the Past

So there are two cool things about being a missionary and sending monthly updates. The first is that I have to take more time to process what God's teaching me so I can explain it to other people. The second is that people write back! I love hearing from people! I love that I get to interact with people that I may not have otherwise!

Case in point: Just this week I got to talk to a former high school youth group sponsor from my church and my elementary art school teacher. How cool is that!?!? Art was by FAR my favorite special class in elementary school! Writing back to her made me think of fun conversation inspired by one of the projects that we did when I was in fifth grade.

Not too long ago, I was telling my friend Lydia (4 years old) about some masks that we made. We put Vaseline on our faces, got some cloth/plastery strips wet, overlapped the strips on our faces with only holes for our eyes and nose, and let them dry. After they set for a few minutes, we pulled them off, scrubbed some crusty stuff off our faces around the hairline, and returned to class. The next few classes we decorated the masks with paint and feathers and such. They were SO COOL because they were individualized...exactly the size of YOUR face! Lydia seemed interested and asked a few questions to better understand the mask making process. Then I told her that we made another mask like that in seventh grade and that my face was a different shape by then. I was thinking about how I had really chubby cheeks in fifth grade and how the mask I made in seventh grade was much smaller, less rounded...my seventh grade face seemed so small when I tried to put it into my fifth grade mask. Lydia, however, stared at me wide-eyed and asked, "What shape WAS it?!?!" It turns out she was thinking my face had literally changed shapes so that it was triangle or square or another "shape." Ha ha!! I love kids!