Finding a Church Home

We feel very blessed to be part of a church family that helps us to grow spiritually and who loves our family. Yesterday was the first Sunday in a few weeks that I was able to be at church, and I realized just how much I missed it. When I woke up this morning, it was on my heart that I needed to share with everyone (well, everyone who reads this) just how lucky we are to have such a great church home and why we love it so much. One day, before we were married, Tommy was in the grocery store on a Sunday just after noon. He rounded the corner and literally ran into a couple he knew from 1st Baptist in Lafayette. It was obvious to them by the way Tommy was dressed, that he wasn't at church that day. So they asked if he had found a place to go. They told him about this great church nearby that they were attending and told him to try it out. So two weeks after we were married, we attended our first Sunday at Tallowood Baptist Church. We fell in love immediately. We became regular members of a Sunday School class with other young married couples. We thoroughly enjoyed the pastor and the messages he brought to us each week. We also made good friends through the church, friends who are today some of our best friends. When John was born, most of our time was spent at the hospital with him. For 3 months, we spent every Sunday at Texas Children's Hospital, just being with our son. We had many visitors from our church over those 3 months. We had ministers come to visit us, we had friends from Sunday School come to visit and even once we had a total stranger come to visit. She and her husband had visited our Sunday School department the previous Sunday and she heard about our family. She happened to be a doctor at the hospital so she decided to come down and introduce herself to me and let me know that if there was anything I needed or something medical that I didn't understand, I could call her anytime and she would help me. All that from a total stranger. How awesome is that? We even got phone calls from people in the church that we didn't know, who saw in our Sunday bulletin that John had been born. Our church prints each Sunday when a new baby is born, who the parents are and how much the baby weighed. When they saw his weight, they figured he must have been premature, so they looked us up and called to tell us they had clothes that might fit him or just to offer us advice because they too were parents of a premature baby. All of these things made us feel very loved and gave us the support we desperately needed during those difficult times. When our church decided to start a new church in the Katy area, we toyed with the idea of going there because it was much closer to us. But we thought about how much we love our pastor and all of our friends and we thought about all of the support we got during those months and years after John was born, and we decided we just couldn't leave. After John came home from the hospital, we weren't sure what to do about church. We wanted to go, but because of his medical issues, we just weren't prepared to leave him in regular child care. We talked to the directors of our Sunday School department and they told us we could bring him with us to Sunday School. So that is what we did, for 3 years. Each Sunday, we would go to Sunday School and take John with us. We liked to say that he was our class mascot. But we would leave after Sunday School without going to the service. We felt he would be too much of a distraction during the church service. After 3 years of this, we finally met with the preschool minister to talk about finding John his own Sunday School class. We were aware that Tallowood had a department for kids with special needs, but the minimum age to be in that class was 6 years old. We finally found a class that we thought John would do well in. It was a class of 18-24 month old kids and the teachers of that class was a married couple who had experience with special needs. Once John started that class, we were finally able to go back to "Big Church". He got to spend 2 hours in there each Sunday and he seemed to really enjoy it. When promotion time came around the next year, it was decided that it would be best for him to stay in that class another year. So he did. We loved the Olivier's and the rest of the people who worked with him in there. But by the time he was 5, we all decided he was just too big to be with that same age group of kids. With nowhere else for him to go, the children's minister decided to let him into the Tallowood Treasures class a little early. We were so thankful that our church worked with us at finding a suitable place for John to spend his Sunday mornings, so that we could worship together. John has been part of the Tallowood Treasures for 2 years now. Two of the main teachers are certified life skills teachers. They know how to use different methods to teach our kids about God's love. There are also several volunteers who help the teachers and who love our kids deeply. We've always felt comfortable with John being there without us. Over the years, his medical issues became a little less urgent and since we were in the same building he was in, we knew that if there was a problem, we could be there in a hurry. But this year the church has started to kind of revamp the department just a little. All the teachers and volunteers are the same, but they decided to make one of the teachers the director of the department. And she has been working really hard, meeting with parents and researching other churches with special needs programs to find the best way to meet all of our needs and make it an even better place for our kids to spend their Sunday mornings. For the past two years, John has been able to attend Vacation Bible School as part of the Treasures class. This year, the church decided to go through a nursing agency and have a registered nurse spend the week with them in Vacation Bible School. It apparently went so well, that they decided to hire her on a regular basis. So now, each Sunday when our son goes to his class, not only does he have wonderful teachers and volunteers to help meet his spiritual needs, but he also has a registered nurse present to help meet his medical and physical needs. I am so excited that they have decided to do this. Maybe this will get more parents back to church who have been afraid to leave their child without the care of a medical professional. If you or someone you know has a special needs child and are looking for a wonderful church home in the Houston area, look us up. For more information, you can go to the church's website at www.tallowood.org or you can contact me. We would love to see you on Sundays.