The "Bea Long" Song

In Kelsey's blog yesterday, she told about how she is learning "Two-anese," her word for Sweetpea's two-year-old language. It was really fun to read, and it made me think back on some of the language puzzles that we had to work our way through when the boys were little.

For years, our good friend, Bea Long, from Juneau, taught the two- and three-year-old Bible class. When Chris turned two, he was excited to get to move up, into Bea's class. The children learned a lot in that little preschool class. I was always happy when Chris would bring home a picture he had scribbled on, and tell me names and events from the Bible story Bea had taught.

He was probably three-, going on four-years-old when, one day, sitting at the kitchen table, Chris said, "Mama, let's sing the Bea Long song."

"The Bea Long song?" I asked. "I don't think I know that song."

"Uh-huh," he assured me. And then he began to sing it:

"Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him - BEA LONG! [hollered out, with his fist pumping the air]
They are weak but he is strong."

Apparently Chris wasn't the first one to think that this song was, somehow, about Bea. When I told Bea this story, she said that another little fellow, who had been in her class a few years before Chris, had been under the same misconception.

Well, of course, that song isn't about Bea. But to those little toddlers, associating Jesus' love, the Bible, and Bea Long, together in one song, was perfectly understandable.

Love you, Bea!