Why we are not to forsake the assembly

I don't know whether it was because of Daylight Savings Time or March Break or maybe a combination of both, but Sunday School attendance was WAY down this morning. Our Sunday School/Youth Group/Adult Bible Class begins at 9:40 a.m. We all meet together in the activity centre first and have our opening devotions, then around 10 a.m. we go off to our classes.

During opening this morning I noticed that none of my students had arrived yet. By 10 o'clock my students were still all MIA. I was pretty dejected. I went off to my class anyway, hoping that there might be stragglers, but when I arrived there it was empty. I looked into the class across from mine and saw that Hildegard's class was empty as well. Hildegard looked up and said, "Oh hi, how are you?" "Fine," I lied. "No, you're not," she said and came over and put her arms around me. "Tell me," she said.

And so I began to cry and told her how it hurt my heart when "my kids" didn't come. I wondered if they knew how much they mean to me - how much their very presence is an encouragement to me and how when they don't come I feel somehow empty and incomplete. How do you explain to little ones how much it means to us "older ones" that they simply come? When they don't come, I miss them, I even worry a bit about them. All I can do is pray for them, I concluded.

Hildegard, who is very kind, and very wise, agreed. "And why should we pray alone?" she wondered. "Let's pray for them together," she said, leading me to the tiny chairs in her room. And so we took turns praying, lifting up the children that weren't there - and their parents as well - to their Father in heaven.

As we prayed, I gained a bit more understanding of why we are not to foresake the assembly. Our absence can actually hurt others! Imagine if Hildegard had not come today. I would not have had the benefit of being ministered to...and she would have missed the opportunity to minister to another. These are the very things that we are called to do and we can't do them if we don't assemble.

If you are wondering, eventually one of my students, Jacob, came in. We had our lesson and it must have been good because he told me "When the others find out what we did, they're going to be sorry they missed it!"

Thank you, Jacob. You just ministered to me.