Sermon on the Mount

We had a poor turnout this week due to heavy rain. No one but our core families, until one other boy & his mom showed up about halfway through the morning.

It was maybe just as well. I remember this from three years ago as a really fun story time, but it seemed to fall kind of flat. I think maybe one thing I did wrong was to read the Scripture first & then assemble the little tableaux, when we already knew what they were supposed to represent. Sigh.

But the game was popular once again! We said, much of Jesus' teaching took traditional ideas and turned them upside down. So we will turn upside down—doing somersaults! Most of the adults tried it as well as the kids, with hilarious results.

Conveniently, next Sunday is Chinese New Year. So our craft followed the injunction to be private about your giving. A friend of ours operates a daycare center for children from low-income families. So we bought gifts for each of the children in their center, and craft time was wrapping the presents. Which we are asking the center's director not to reveal which church donated them.

We had some pretty lively discussion during the adult Bible study time. We had just the one mom who is nominally Christian. But even some of our believers would like to get around some of Jesus' statements about things like loving your enemies, I think. But Mrs. Leung's reaction was priceless. Someone restated, "This means, when someone treats you dirty, you cannot treat them dirty in return." She yelped, "WHAT?!" Her speech is a little hard to understand, so I'm not totally sure she understood the concept by the time we were finished. But she was obviously engaged!

This was the mom of the boy I mentioned last week, that I'd given a whack on the head when he was trying to wipe his saliva on the puzzle pieces that the girl sitting next to him was playing with. So I was glad to see them back, and glad that the boy doesn't seem to be holding a grudge, as Mr. Lei was afraid he would. I still want to visit them over Chinese New Year though!