I Quake Before Authority

Yet another example of how 'timid' I am came up this Sunday.

In Sunday School.

(Note: When I say something happened in Sunday School, the Teacher's expression becomes a combination of 'oh dear', 'what did you do now', and 'am I going to have to call someone to apologize?' Sunday School is one of my more famous battle-grounds with my nemesis, Adult-Who-Didn't-Read-The-Lesson-Until-An-Hour-Ago-But-Still-Thinks-I'm-The-Stupid-One-Because-I'm-Not-Twenty-One-Yet-And-They-Have-The Manual-And-They're-So-Going-Down.)

(Another Note: I'm pretty sure this teacher read the lesson ahead of time. And he's been my Sunday School teacher for two months now, so he knows better than to think I'm stupid. Which is more than I can say for some teachers, who never get past the teenagers-don't-know-anything-about-the-church stage, but I won't go there.)

Anyway, he was teaching the story about Hagar and Sarai and how Hagar was going to have Abram's kid because Sarai was barren. And then he said that even though this was Sarai's idea she got jealous and hated Hagar and threw her out.

Um... no. I disagreed. And just so you know, this wasn't both of us arguing off the tops of our heads: it was right there in the verse we had just read as a class.

I continued to disagree for about fifteen minutes, at which point he said "You know what, I concede, I'll look over this later, now let's move on-"

And I said, "I don't want you to concede, I'm not trying to win anything here, I just want you to understand what I'm saying," and it went on for another ten minutes or so.

At which point I finally realized that he was reading "and her mistress was despised in her eyes" (that was off the top of my head, but it was something like that) with the modern meaning of mistress, which is you-know-what, instead of the biblical meaning of the word, which is 'woman of authority; the feminine of master', which I was just taking for granted. And which totally changes all the meaning in that verse. Once he got that he realized what I was saying.

All I can say is that the rest of the class was very quiet and very focused on us while this was going on, which I didn't realize until it was over. I wish I could be a stranger sitting in on my Sunday School class. It would be funny to watch.

And I did apologize to my teacher after class for taking so much time from his lesson. He said that it was okay but he would cut me off if I tried to do the same thing with something that wasn't relevant to the lesson. I love having a teacher who doesn't push me around and won't let me push him around. It makes Sunday School much more interesting.