Article December 16, 2013 ISSUE

'Leave the angel on the table'

Toni Turpen

In the common category of “the students in Sunday School will often teach you more than you could possibly teach them,” I wanted to share this story.

Last year I was substituting for one of the very young classes, and since it was almost Christmas, I brought along some small wooden folk-art characters from a nativity set with the plan that we would talk about the Christmas story. It turned out that there was one student, a little boy, in the class that day.

Together we sat at a small table: me with the characters piled in my lap—him excited for a Bible story. In an acting-it-out way, I began with the angel visiting Mary. I brought the angel Gabriel up onto the table and explained God is always with us, but sometimes when we hear His messages, we call them “angels” (see Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 581 ). And I told my student this angel thought spoke to Mary. Then I had the angel making an exit, back to the pile in my lap.

As the story proceeded, characters were added to the surface of the table. Since I was merging the Gospel accounts from both Matthew and Luke, the angel kept reappearing and speaking to people: Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, etc.

By about the third time the angel made an entrance, my little student said: “Why don’t you just leave the angel on the table? We’re probably going to hear from him in a minute anyway!” 

And just like that, I learned something. The truth is that we can and should strive to “leave the angel on the table” all the time! We are much more blessed and inspired if we think of angel thoughts as being continually a part of our story, not sporadically entering and exiting on cue. We can all expect this year round, not only at Christmastime.

About the author

Toni Turpen lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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