Commandment Three

Time for a blog update. It will be sketchy, as I wasn't there. My husband had hip replacement surgery on Friday June 18^th over in Hong Kong so I have been there (here) with him.

We used the story of Job to illustrate this commandment about not using the Lord's name inappropriately. Highlights would be "Satan" in his/her red mask bragging about how many people he has led astray, and "God" in his/her halo pointing out righteous Job. So then of course the trials begin—pictures of his flocks & herds & children are systematically carried away by armed raiders, or destroyed. Finally Job ends up with sores (bandaids) all over his arms & legs. (Handy that this was summer; more flesh exposed!). Then his friends come and lay into him about how he must be a great sinner or God would never treat him like this.

Eventually God appears and scolds the friends for using His name wrongly, by saying untrue things about His dealings with us. Job receives new flocks & herds & children.

For the game we had little clip art pictures of donkeys, camels, oxen and sheep in various numbers, masking-taped face-down on plastic blocks & evenly distributed into two plastic bags. Players divided into two teams, each with a "Job". The other players, relay-style, would take a block from the bag & run it to Job, where they would peel off the tape to find the animal, and make a check next to that category. First team to restore at least one of all four kinds of animal to Job was the winner. This wasn't original; I found it on a website somewhere & if I could remember where I would give it credit. Sorry!

Craft was obvious. Job's friends did a lousy job at being a comfort to him when he was sick. So the kids practiced a much better way to behave toward sick friends—creating get-well cards. They made them for my husband! Kevin, who has been staying at our home to cat-sit, collected them to bring back & have there to surprise Bruce when he got back home.

But I ended up bringing them here to the hospital instead. I rushed home to Macau yesterday (Wednesday) to arrange things for this Sunday, among other errands, and then rushed back to Hong Kong this morning to be here for Bruce's second surgery, since his too-thin thigh bone fractured sometime post-op. So I won't be at Merciful Love for the next commandment either…

Commandment Two

For our story about not worshipping idols, we chose the account of Daniel's three friends and the fiery furnace. Started out by re-introducing King Josiah from last week's story & recalled that God was not going to punish Judah until after he died. So now—he's died. (Gets plonked back onto chair.) God indeed punished the people with exile to Babylon. (Two guys with swords escort everyone around the room.)

The king of Babylon wasn't a humble guy like Josiah. In fact, he was so proud, he didn't want to be just respected, he wanted to be worshipped! (This is my "free" version of the Bible story, which does not actually say what the image was that the people were supposed to worship. I'm just guessing it was likely an image of the king himself.) So we dressed a second child in the same purple-tissue-paper robe and gold-paper crown as the king, and had a couple of adults lift her onto a stool. (We're short of boys these days!)

During the announcement of the "rules of worship" we played snippets of each type of musical instrument we mentioned, from a little toy keyboard. Of course then the three friends didn't bow to the idol when the bad guys played the music when the friends were near the statue. So they got thrown into the "furnace" which was one of our side bedrooms, with paper flames taped along the sides.

When the king peeked into the furnace and saw something he didn't expect, we had him tell everyone to come look. Which gave the pre-cued volunteer the chance to slip into the "furnace" from the back via the connecting bedroom—picking up a halo for himself along the way. :-)

When the king called the friends to come out, he had to sniff at them all to see if they smelled like smoke. (They didn't.)

Again, a slight poetic re-write: we ended the story with the king declaring that Yahweh was clearly the right God to worship, so we wouldn't be needing that statue anymore (pull it down).

Although unlike idols, God is invisible, He still showed His power over the flames. Just like an invisible puff of air can blow out a candle flame, right? Game time had everyone blowing up (with or without help) balloons and then aiming them at candles to try and blow them out. Most of the kids got the right idea about pointing the balloon in the right direction and letting the air out, but it was harder to convince them that they needed to let it out fast. The "slow leak" stuff didn't do the job! It was fun trying though!

For a craft we made what one of the kids called "fire popsicles." (Popsicles translate as snow sticks; so these were then "fire sticks"). Cut-down juice-boxes wrapped with "flame" paper; a hole on the bottom letting you slide a popsicle stick up & down with three cutout boys glued to the end, going in & out of the furnace. A lot of work to prepare the materials (drank a lot of juice last week!), but easy to assemble on the day & everyone liked them.

Commandment One

First thing to do was to have one of the kids paste the first commandment up on the big "tablets" at the front of the room. Only as I was having him read it out did I realize that I had made a typo & written 耶和話 for耶和華. Oops!

We told the story of King Josiah and the discovery of the scroll in the temple that made him realize how far the nation had gone away from God, and the danger of having done so. That morning I had put several drawings of altars or "totem poles" up on the walls, which were used during the story to illustrate how the land was filled with worship of false gods. So at the end the kids had to take them all down and tear them up.

Our game followed the theme of "destruction"—a relay race with two stacks of fairly simple puzzles that had to be completely taken apart, no pieces still stuck together, before the next person in line could go. Should have been a good game but between two adults needed to receive the puzzle pieces into separate bags (so we wouldn't have to sort them all out at the end), and one to keep the kids waiting in line instead of running up & surrounding the players as they like to do, no one was watching the ends of the lines. So somehow they didn't come out even & we never did figure out who had been left out of the race. Sigh.

We made little "phylacteries" for craft time which worked great three years ago, but this time I used the wrong kind of paper, I guess; the glue just didn't want to stick it together well enough. The kids had these flapping-open boxes bobbing on their foreheads…I am not batting 1.000 on crafts these days!!

Receiving the Law on Mount Sinai

We started our story with a little question-and-answer time. We had seen how God had taken care of the Israelites—besides God, who takes care of YOU? (mom & dad) So, what should you do to show them how thankful you are? (be obedient) What are some things you should do to be an obedient child? Here each one had to come up with an example, or, for the non-verbal kids, had to nod agreement to a possible suggestion. Fun to get the kids of all types involved & thinking!

Next question: is it important to obey God, too? (yes) What should we do to be obedient? The good thing is, He tells us through His Word, and in today's story we will see how He first told His people about His law.

Okay, so the Israelites have been traveling for some time now (everybody gets up & follows the designated Moses once around the room) and are now in the Sinai wilderness. There is a tall mountain there (a tall, double-sided stepladder), called Mt. Sinai. God has told Moses He is going to come down to meet him on the mountain. Since God is coming so near, everyone had to be clean & nicely dressed & ready to greet him. So first, everyone had to line up & each received a washcloth to dip in a basin of water, to wash their faces. Then all the boys got neckties to wear, and all the girls got "corsages" (more like boutonnieres)—rather than fussing with pins for those, I used masking tape which worked fine & was much quicker & safer!

A white sheet was then held hovering over the ladder by a couple of tall helpers. "God" shook the ladder & blew a horn & climbed up the backside, then called for Moses to come up. He did & then we had to all count to 40, since he was up there that many days & nights. Then he came down holding a clay tablet bearing the "ten commandments" (actually just the Roman numerals I-X). Moses announced to the people that next week, we would start studying those commandments one at a time.

For game time, everyone had to sit down while we blu-tacked the numbers 1-10 in random order on the walls & floor. Numbers were then drawn one at a time. For the first number, everyone was in the race to find & grab the right card. Once any person had a card, however, he/she could not go for another until everyone had "won" one. It went well. A key was making everyone sit back down between each number.

Our craft was making clay tablets like the one Moses had brought down from the mountain. We had pre-cut "double tablet" shapes. Everyone got a lump of quick-drying clay to roll out to smoothly cover the shapes, using wooden or plastic dowels (I had some of each on hand; just enough!). Then they were to "carve" the numbers 1-10 into the clay.

When I was going over this with the day's leader, she said she really wasn't familiar with Roman numerals. We foreigners think "ten commandments" and automatically think Roman numerals but hey, you know what? I bet that even if they were numbered on those original tablets, it wasn't in Roman numerals! So we went "indigenous" and used the Chinese numerals: 一﹐二﹐三﹐四﹐五﹐六﹐七﹐八﹐九﹐十﹗Sorry no photos though; the numbers didn't photograph well in the white clay.

I went back & tried again to take a picture; here we go:

I heard the Bible study generated some good discussion. One interesting point being that God obviously wanted to communicate with His people, which their Chinese gods do not. (All religions are NOT just the same!)