Fifth commandment, and a welcome break

It was good to be back with the Merciful Love crowd this Sunday! I was still feeling pretty wiped out from all the drama of Bruce's hospitalization. So I was very thankful to be able to just dump the responsibility for the story in Kevin's capable lap. He'd led a story on the Prodigal Son a couple of years ago, and that is the story of choice for the theme of "Honor Your Father and Mother." Doesn't Ka Ho look the part of the young man living high on the hog on his father's money?

Our game was "pass the hats"—one "parent's hat" and one "child's hat" were passed around the circle as music played. When it stopped, whoever was the "child" had to kneel and pur a cup of tea for the "parent." The crowd was a little too big so that there were a lot of repeats before some of the kids got one chance to be in the game. But we hadn't wanted to restrict it to just the kids, because it's part of the fun when some adult has to reverse the roles and kneel before a child to honor them with this tea ceremony.

When we'd done this commandment before, it happened to fall on Father's Day, so the craft was obvious. However, it didn't work out that way this year, so we needed something different. One thing that we wanted to bring out in the discussion on the story was that neither of the two sons in the parable really believed in or appreciated the depth of their father's love for them. So we honored the parents' love by making them Olympic style gold medals (chocolate) with stickers on the back reading 愛心獎 (love award), and then had a little ceremony awarding them to the parents/caregivers. Mrs. Wong won two gold medals!

I really enjoyed leading the Bible study time. We talked about how bad they would feel if their children didn't believe they loved them, or didn't want a real relationship with them but only wanted what they could get out of them. We then pointed out how Jesus had actually told this parable to help us get to know our heavenly Father—and do you suppose He feels bad when we don't want to have a love relationship with him? No one gave me a verbal answer, but everyone looked a bit stunned at the thought. A good concept for them to chew on during the coming week!

This morning Bruce was back with us. He managed the four flights of stairs just fine with his crutches! We didn't have a regular program; again a team of three helpers from a church in Hong Kong watched the kids (along with Bruce who isn't up to a lot of running around in the heat yet), and the rest of the adults went to an outdoor café in a nearby park for some drinks and conversation.

Trying to continue on the theme we sort of began last week, my plan was to discuss how to develop a heart relationship with our heavenly Father. I was surprised to find how many didn't seem to find it a difficult concept to pour out their hearts to God (Psalm 62:8). Just in case their words were more confident than their practice, however, I did go ahead and pass out little cards with some suggestions for getting started, such as, "Heavenly Father, I feel sad about…I don't know what to do about…I am fearful of…I don't understand…"etc.

Another thing that came out during the discussion, which we started by asking, "to whom do you turn when you need to share your heart with someone?" was how much these parents are able to trust and share freely with one another. This kind of openness is not terribly common in the Chinese church, and it's truly a blessing!