The Family Reunited

I know I'm supposed to be writing these stories so they're reproducible in the future. But I got carried away and wrote in stuff that requires our particular facility as well as some of our particular attendees!

The story starts early in the famine years predicted in Pharaoh's dream. Joseph has been in Egypt a long time & always speaks Egyptian now, not Hebrew. So Bruce played Joseph in our story because of his ability to speak a "foreign language"—English. First we had a couple of Egyptians come to him to buy grain, doing the bent-elbow "Egyptian walk." Then it was time for Jacob back in Canaan to send ten of his sons to Egypt to buy grain. They exited out the door to the balcony & came back into the living room (where we hold our main meeting) via one of the side bedrooms. When they had to go back to Canaan, they reversed this route. They had to go back and forth three times, so we got our exercise!

During the whole first visit, Joseph, not wanting to be recognized by his brothers, spoke English & I, as his servant, translated. And translated back to him when the brothers spoke.

Joseph was supposed to grab one of the brothers and say that he was going to have to stay behind in prison. He grabbed the nearest person, who happened to be the mother of two girls. The younger girl started to cry when they had to leave their mom behind all tied up & go back to Canaan! Poor kid. She didn't want to participate in the rest of the story, but finally we convinced her that she needed to go back to "Egypt" to rescue her mom. :-)

We had been using small ziplock bags filled with rice to hand out when people were buying grain. Joseph's small china cup (the only silver one we had was way too big) was put into Benjamin's bag. We used this combo for our game. Divided into two teams; each team had one full bag of rice & one small china cup. Relay style, each child had to scoop out some rice with the cup & then run up to the front of the room & pour the contents into a tall glass. The winning team was not only the faster team, but had a fuller glass; they didn't spill as much. Clear winner!

The story went extra long with all the traveling the brothers had to do. By contrast, the craft was very quick and easy. We cut out preprinted (by hand) templates on sandpaper and made pyramids!