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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