What’s Your Story: Name Edition

Letter From Evangeline Burgers

Hello Church Community,

I pray that you had a great time celebrating our Earth on Wednesday and that you’ve overall had a good week with your families at home. 

Last week, Pastor Jenny started a new sermon series on stories and she challenged us to share a story about our beginning. One way children might think about their story of beginning is through sharing about their names. One of my very favorite activities to do when I taught Kindergarten was for parents to share the story of their child’s name with the class. We all learned so much about our friends this way and I found it a powerful opportunity to build up a child’s esteem and affirm their identity.

I’ve recorded a read-aloud of my personal favorite book, Chrysanthemum, to help our children think about names and their significance. There’s also this fun video from Scholastic featuring people sharing their name stories. 

If you have a chance, talk with your child about their name. Tell the story of how you decided on their name when they were a baby. Are they named after a specific ancestor or special friend? Is there a funny story about how their name came to be? Why did you love it? Then help your child to share the story of their name in the read-aloud YouTube comments. I pray this will be a fun way for our children to share their personal name stories with one another.

Names are just one small piece of what makes our story special. I love the image Pastor Jenny mentioned last week from Psalms about God knitting us in our mother’s womb. What a beautiful and exciting life we live, that we get to co-write our stories with God!

To follow up from Sunday School last week, I challenged our children to reach out to a friend they are missing and tell them how much they care about them. I’ve attached a “Thinking of You” coloring page here for them to do just that!

Have a great week and let me know if you need anything!

Love,

Evangeline Burgers

Director of Children’s Ministry

Princeton UMC

609-924-2613 (church phone)

She/Her/Hers

Happy Earth Day!

Canticle of Creation
The Canticle of Creation
By Evangeline Burgers
Happy Earth Day! Did you know that today marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day? To commemorate this special day, I’ve put together some fun resources for your families to use. Pastor Jenny opened her new sermon series this past week talking about God’s story (and our story!) in Genesis and it feels fitting to continue to celebrate our Earth and Cosmos with Genesis this week with our families!
St. Francis of Assisi wrote a beautiful “Canticle of Creation”. Feel free to print off the attached coloring page of the prayer to reflect on God’s creation. Then you can turn it into a “stained glass window” by following these easy steps with your coloring page.
Here is an imaginative prayer to celebrate Earth Day!  I’ve recorded myself leading the prayer, but you might rather do it as a family so there is a .pdf attached of this prayer, “God Loves So Many Things”, from Jared Patrick Boyd’s book, Imaginative Prayer.
Henry and I have been LOVING reading a new book this week that is inspired by God’s story told in Genesis. It is called Love Made and it was written by a spoken word artist named Quina Aragon, when she was pregnant with her daughter. Here is a beautiful animation video with the same poem that was made before the book was published. Then the author tells her powerful story here, with a preview of the picture book. I’m excited for us to continue to explore our own stories with our families in the coming days.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns about anything and I hope to see our children at 4:30 today at online  Children’s Choir practice with Mr. Tom.