Monday, February 17, 2014

February 17 – “aiaiai, colugo, and stoat”

I got a phone message from an old friend from Denver yesterday.  He and his wife were in town to run in the half-marathon part of the Galveston marathon.  I haven’t seen or heard from Rocky since we left there back in 1995.  That’s almost nineteen years.  No wonder my old brain took a while to wrap itself around who that voice belonged to.  In part of the message he referred to me as “that Ron Santo-type guy who played third base for the church softball team.”  As I told him when we finally made connections, “Anybody who compares me with Ron Santo is my friend for life.” 

We cycled back to the smaller crowd at church yesterday.  I guess everyone was attending (or more likely avoiding) the huge cheerleader convention that was in town.  It was a great group, though.  Very much into worship.  They even told me they enjoyed the teaching.  Must have been the Holy Spirit in that case.

I took a little bit of a different approach to the kids’ sermon.  When it takes so long to work through a story, it is hard to keep coming up with new approaches to get the kids interested.  This time I handed out blank paper and a crayon to each kid.  And there were quite a few adults who wanted to be involved this time, so they grabbed for a sheet of paper, too.  I asked them close their eyes and draw a picture of a camel.  That kind of threw them off their game plan a bit, but we got some, well, interesting pictures.  I liked the one with a very small round body and a hugely fat head.  Strangest camel I have ever seen.  But all of them had humps.  After they showed off what they had drawn to each other, I showed a picture of an actual camel on the screen so they could compare.  They did so well that I gave them another challenge … an elephant.  My favorite picture on this one looked like an amoeba with a trunk.  One of the adults actually sketched an outline that closely resembled the picture on the screen.  The third one was the state of Texas.  All the kids managed the coastline where Galveston is located, but the rest of the state was somewhat discombobulated (I always wanted to use that word in a sentence).  One of the adults who is in college at Baylor was here visiting.  She is from Chicago, so she tried to draw the state of Illinois.  I have no idea how close she was to being accurate, though.  Could have been perfect, though.  Is Illinois just a rectangle with a squiggly line at the bottom?  If so, she nailed it.  After those three everybody was really into the swing of things, so I kept going.  They had some problems with the aiaiai and the colugo and the stoat, though.  Not a single person even attempted one of them.  They claimed they had never seen them before.  I had to show them the pictures to convince them that they were real creatures.  I guess they had a point, though.  How can you draw something you have never seen?

Perfect transition.  That’s how the man felt in the story today.  He had never seen anything … ever.  He was blind when he was born.  And then Jesus came along and gave him his sight.  That had to be an amazing feeling for him.  It was kind of confusing, too, for everybody else.  Noone had ever seen anything like it, and they weren’t sure what to do.  So they took him to the leaders of their religion and asked them.  But that was a problem, too.  See, the leaders already didn’t like Jesus, so they were really mean to the man.  So much so that he had to decide.  Will I follow Jesus who gave me sight, or these men who lead my religion?  What do you think he chose?  Right!  Jesus.  And we can, too. 

Joshua 24:14-15 says, “Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.  But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Father, help us to follow you no matter what anybody says.  Amen.

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