Last night, late, my two oldest girls and I were in the Anchorage airport, getting ready to board a plane for Minneapolis and then Indianapolis for my sister's wedding.  It was going to be a long flight and a a late flight but it had the misfortune of being at 9:20 PM at night.  This is too late to stay up all night and too early to want to go to sleep right away...particularly if you're a 12 year-old girl, which they are.  So, I broke down and let them rent a DVD player and a DVD.  In our household we're pretty strict about what movie they can and can't watch and so it was PG or G and nothing else for them.  The eventually settled on "Aliens in the Attic" which I didn't watch and didn't care about but it managed to keep them entertained for an hour and half of the five and one half hour flight.

One of the movies I was encouraging them to get was "Where the Wild Things Are" based on the book by Maurice Sendak.  This was a book near and dear to my childhood, not just because it had a good story but because my mom had a good story to go with it.  Apparently, when she was a teacher in Boston, she was asked to read the yet unpublished book to her (I think) kindergarten class to see if they'd be too scared of it.  They weren't and, at least as far as I remember it, it is that early testing that showed that the book was safe for childhood consumption.

Now, a lot of folks have talked about this book over the past year or so as it has been made into the movie directed by Spike Jonze.  Some have lamented that the seems a distant memory in the updated version of the movie.  But, then again, I've not seen the movie.  I know that Sendak was a consultant on the movie and has very favorable comments to say about it.

One of the things about this story is that, Max gets to run away and be king of the wild things, and join in the wild rumpus.  But after he has been away from his family for a while and the thrill of being with the wild things wears thin, Max remembers home and his mom and the feelings he has felt there.  It says the following:

"And Max the king of all the wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all." 

Isn't that a sentiment that many of us can identify with.  We want to be where we feel and experience love.  That's what Max wanted.

How can we, in the church, be the place people go when they want to experience being loved "best of all?"