The More We Get Together

One of my participants at SBEC was singing yesterday morning. I have no idea what sparked it. I was standing at my desk grabbing their books and I just hear her singing:

"The more we get together, together, together, the more we get together the happier we'll be."

As I was coming around to the table where my class was gathered, she was just singing away and said "Teacher, I remember when you sang that song to us!" And a huge smile lit up my face. I'd almost forgotten. It was my very first day at SBEC back in August, when I was still trying out all the different ministries. I was sent to help out in the classroom upstairs and the first question thrown at me by the teacher was "do you sing?" I lied and said no, because there was no way I was about to sing in front of this huge room of people.

Evidently it didn't matter what I said, I was singing for them and that was that. I was ridiculously embarrassed, I don't sing on my own. But there I was, singing away. And they loved it, they just smiled and smiled at me. And then they started to sing it with us. And I smiled. And everyone loved it.

And now some 5 months later, one of the women from that very first day is in my reading and job retention class. And she remembers that song, and that I sang it to them, and that it has a good message that they all loved, as simple as it is. The more we get together, the happier we'll be.

It's a good message for me to reflect on today. It holds true for whatever I'm doing and with anyone, but especially at my ministries. The more time I spend working with my participants at SBEC, the happier they are because they keep learning more and practicing more, and they realize a potential they may not have known they had. They're reading whole books with me, for goodness sake! Books! They probably never thought they'd make it through reading a whole worksheet, and here we are reading 130 pages of kid's poems. Talk about happy!

Same thing for my kids at the Cafe. The more time we spend together, the happier we all are. I say it all the time. They're happy for attention and activities to do and food to eat and someone giving them the time of day for a couple of hours. The longer I'm there with them, the more time we have together, the better I feel the relationships getting, the more I value them, and the more they trust me

I love that it's simply "the more we get together." It's not the more things I give you, or the more things you give me, or the more money we spend on each other or anything. It's just being together. That's all it takes to be happy, spending time with people you care about.

And man, am I one happy person.