Mystery Music

All week long Rachel has been repeating, almost demandingly, a partially comprehensible sentence:

"Jesus come donna."

All week long I've been trying to guess what she's saying.

"Jesus comes again?" No.

"Jesus comes down?" No.

That's about how far I got before I couldn't think of anything else that "donna" could possibly mean. Then tonight at dinner, quite out of the blue, Rachel said,

"I wanna go Jordan!"

Andrew and I looked at each other. We've been discussing making a trip to Israel/Palestine/Jordan for a while, but most of our discussion has been happening after Rachel has been put to bed.

"You want to go to Jordan?" we asked.

"Yeah," she nodded, "Jesus come donna in Jordan! I wanna go Jordan, too!"

Andrew and I looked at each other. Our dinner was getting cold. But we just couldn't figure this girl out. So we just sat there, staring at each other.

"Jesus came to John the Baptist!" I finally blurted out like I had figured out a Wheel-of-Fortune puzzle or won Jeopardy or something equally life-changing.

"Yeah," Rachel said after recovering from my overenthusiastic outburst, "Jesus come donna..."

"Baptist." Andrew finished for her, "Jesus came to...John...the...Baptist."

Phew. So now we know that when she says "Jesus come donna" she's requesting for us to sing Baptism for her. With that figured out and our previous dinner conversation topic completely forgotten we decided to start a new one.

"What did you learn in nursery today?" Andrew asked Rachel.

"I'm Jesus!" she said, pointing to herself proudly.

Once again Andrew and I stopped chewing and stared at each other. Last week I asked the two young women in our branch to teach nursery for the rest of the summer. I suddenly found myself regretting that decision since my daughter had apparently come home from church with a Messiah complex.

"Didn't you learn about saying sorry?" I asked.

Bekah had given me a necklace she had helped Rachel make--a little circle with a picture on it that I couldn't make out because it had been coloured-in so intensely--that said "I can say I'm sorry." She was a little upset that neither Rex or Rachel wanted to wear their necklaces after they had made them. I told her that kids are just like that sometimes and that I was sure they had fun making them.

"Yeah. And...I'm Jesus!" she insisted again.

Luckily we have the nursery manual and use it for our FHE lessons and we've given the "I can say I'm sorry" lesson before. I was sure the answer to why Rachel kept insisting she was Jesus was in the lesson. Still, it took a few minutes before I figured it out.

"I'm trying to be like Jesus?" I asked, tentatively.

"Oh, yeah!" Andrew said, "I'm pretty sure that's the song they suggest singing for that lesson!"

"Yeah!" Rachel squealed with excitement, "Sing mama! Sing I'm Jesus...Jesus doves you!"

In her defense, I'm Trying to Be Like Jesus is a rather long title for a 2-year-old to remember. In defense of Bekah and Clara, they taught a good lesson, even if Rachel didn't catch all the words between "I'm" and "Jesus."