Commandment Four

As I mentioned last week, I couldn't be there for this past Sunday's service, so have no specific highlights to share. Just the general outline, for posterity's sake:

The story we chose to illustrate proper Sabbath-keeping was the gathering of manna in the wilderness. Moses was introduced, and then all the rest of the kids shouldered their "baggage" and followed him around the room. The point was made that this was desert country without enough food to eat. So everyone starts giving Moses a hard time & he prays to God for help. God promises there will be food in the morning. Moses conveys this to the people, and they all go into the side bedrooms and crowd onto the beds to "sleep". Meanwhile the leader scatters a bunch of little foam squares over the floor in the living room. The kids "wake up" the next day & come out & gather it. What does it taste like? Wafer cookie squares passed out to everyone.

What about tomorrow? the people want to know. Go to bed and see! So they all go to bed. The next "morning," they find twice as many squares to gather. More wafers to eat.

Someone asks if this will happen every day. Moses says, almost every day, but did you notice there was twice as much today as yesterday? That is because tomorrow is the Sabbath, when we are not supposed to do any work, including gathering food. You have enough for tomorrow, so you can enjoy sleeping in!

Everybody goes back to bed. But then a couple of kids get up before the others and go out looking for manna. Of course they don't find any. Moses scolds them and says they need to learn to trust God to take care of them, and enjoy their rest. God knows their need for food, and He also knows their need for rest, which is why He created the Sabbath. They eat some more wafers and agree that from now on they will trust God & not just themselves.

Craft came before game time for this lesson. Each child received a box drink (sweetened soy milk, a favorite of all) plus a wrapped rectangle of pressed seaweed (another favorite treat—of theirs, not mine!), and wrapped them together in gift wrap, then labeled it with their own names. Then these were placed aside.

For the game, there were six cooperative tasks involving the stack of stools we use as extra seating: line up ten stools in a row, arrange them in a circle, turn them upside down, flip them back over and stack them by two's, separate them again & wipe them down with cloths, and finally, stack them in one pile and store them in the storeroom. After each task, they were to sit down and pretend to sleep, signifying six days of work. The responsibility after waking up on the seventh day was enjoy God's gift of leisure by opening their gift-wrapped packages and eating and drinking! Like I said, I wasn't there, but I would guess that this was a popular game, especially the ending!

I will be there for the next commandment, hooray! Bruce is safely out of the hospital; this time the hip seems to be holding together nicely, thank the Lord!