Abigail

Kevin Hui led this story the first time around, so this week I got to do more "creative writing" instead of just translating/updating. Enjoyed that! We started out by introducing King David, crown and all, but then explaining that he wasn't actually king yet, Saul was. Crown to Saul. And Saul was jealous of David so was trying to kill him (Saul chases David with sword). So now David and some of his friends were on the run, which meant they didn't always have enough to eat. Today they were passing a sheep farm, and it happened to be shearing time. So we put sheep headbands on a couple of the girls & had them get down on all fours while a servant "sheared" them with a buzzing electric razor (safety cap on!).

David sent a couple of his friends to ask Nabal, the farmer, for some food, but he refused. So David and his friends decide to kill the farmer and his whole family (so who's the big fool here, Nabal or David?). Fortunately, one of the guys was smart enough to look for Nabal's wife Abigail and let her know what was going on. She put some donkey ears on another volunteer, then packed a basket with some meat, bread, fruit and wine, and led the donkey to meet David (oops, should have gotten a picture of this too.) David is grateful not only for the food, but for how her intervention had prevented him from rash action that would not have been pleasing to God. He kisses her hand & leads the donkey away.

The next day, she tells Nabal what happened, and he's so upset he has a stroke (which for some reason struck everyone as very funny). Then we all counted to ten (days), after which Nabal dies and is carried away to be buried. Our Nabal is an older boy who is not always overly cooperative, but he really liked being carried away by two men. We don't always get to see him smile so nicely!

So, after David hears that Nabal is dead, he starts thinking about how beautiful and wise Abigail was, and now she's all alone…hm…so this time, instead of receiving a gift from Abigail, he sends a servant with a gift for her! The servant also relays David's proposal. She accepts, and we end with the wedding march.

Now, when Abigail put fruit and other foodstuffs in the donkey's basket, she undoubtedly packed it neatly and carefully. For our game, however, while we had a donkey drawn on the blackboard, with a basket attached, we put the (fake) fruit in it by throwing it from a few feet away. Not quite so efficient, but more fun!

For our craft, I had to start preparing way ahead of time. Each sheep for our sheep-shearing craft took me over an hour to make, and I needed to prepare for ten kids. (Then of course we only had six…) Here is the "before and after" photo: