And speaking of beginnings…

We had five "family units" that first morning besides ourselves. All with autistic boys from ages 9-22, except for the normal 7-year-old girl. One Christian family, one Catholic family, the rest from a traditional Chinese religious background. So we began at the beginning; Genesis 1. We only did the first four days of creation for our first session. We start with singing—that first Sunday we only taught what is still our theme song, "Thy Lovingkindness is Better than Life;" or, as it translates into Chinese, "Thy Merciful Love, compared to life, is better." Have to get that grammar right or our actions don't make sense. J Then, we started our story. On the first day, God created the heavens and the earth—and the earth was without form, and void. We gathered everyone close together on stools and covered the whole bunch with a big sheet. Let there be light—we turned on the overhead lights. When the waters above were separated from the waters beneath, we lifted off the sheet. Then everyone spread out as the water and the land were separated. Then we gave various kids flowers, and had some adults standing up as trees—one with a banana, one with a bunch of grapes, to be fruit trees (yeah, I know grapes don't grow on trees, but they're great for snacks & mixing in grape vines was just too complicated…). Finally, we had a big yellow balloon for the sun and a smaller one for the moon. For a craft, we made simple paper flowers, with the parents helping the kids. Finally, our brief Bible study with just the adults, while the kids were having free/supervised play time, was from I Chronicles 16:23-37

The next week, we finished up with creation. We used a flannelgraph story for these, having the kids repeat the names of each bird/fish/animal and stick them in the proper places on the background. Then we played the game of "Animal Farm" which was utterly hilarious. We enjoyed seeing how well most of the kids did at imitating the different animals they were assigned to. For a craft, we stuck facial features cut from magazines onto oranges (that was hard—our glue sticks weren't quite sticky enough, or the oranges were too waxy, or something), & talked a little about how all the oranges looked the same at first, but then they all became special to each of us when we "created" them after our own ideas. Adult Bible study was in Psalm 139:13-18

The following week, ALL of our families were off at a Special Olympics event, so no one showed up except Bruce and myself! But we knew it was going to happen—we showed up just in case someone else who had received a brochure came for the first time, but no one did.

This is getting awfully wordy. I think I just need to make a chart, but sometimes elaborate if anything was especially fun or needs more explanation. It's all been fun!! So we'll see if I can be more concise in the future. It's a problem—I start talking about MLFF and I can't shut up! J