A Brave Woman

Today we introduced a woman who, like last week's character, had been suffering for a long time. This woman had had an issue of blood for 12 years. She had spent all her money on doctors, to no avail: we gave our "actress" a small purse with three coins and had her visit three different "doctors" who listened to her heart with a home-made stethoscope and/or took her temperature with a pretzel stick. She was supposed to pay each of them one of her coins but it took a considerable amount of persuasion to get her to part with them. Somehow she ended up with all three back in the purse at the end; I missed how she did that. Anyway, the first two doctors gave her medicine to drink. After drinking the first bottle, we could see that the "blood" (a long red string tucked into her belt) was still there. The second bottle, we said (just to make the story more interesting) not only didn't make the blood go away, it made her throw up. Lai Wun obliged by spitting in her sister's lap—yes, it did make the story more interesting! :-) The third doctor took her money but only shook her head sadly and said, sorry, nothing I can do for you. So by now she was desperate. Then she hears that Jesus has come to her town! She didn't dare ask Him outright for help. After all, she was "unclean," and not worthy of God's care. But, Jesus was so powerful, if she could just touch his clothes, she very well might be healed. So she threaded through the crowd, quickly touched his cloak, and ran away. She did the running away part really well. When Jesus asked who had touched Him, there was no way she was going to be persuaded to come back and tell Him who it was! So Jesus had to go and find her hiding in the corner of the room and tell her not to worry, never to think that God loved her, and that in fact she was healed because God was so pleased by her faith. So, a little different from the original story, but it worked okay.

This woman had sneaked up to Jesus to "steal" power from His body. So for our game, each child had to try to "steal" a piece of chocolate dangling on a string from "Jesus'" clothes. Our volunteer Jesus wasn't very good at dodging, so the game was a little too easy, but this did not disappoint the kids terribly!

The woman was supposed to never forget that God loved her, and we shouldn't forget either. So for craft time we made simple picture frames and wrote on the top "Jesus loves" and their names on the bottom. Then we inserted their personalized angels from the December 19^th craft time. I still had the heads leftover from the kids who hadn't come that day, so since Sally was there this time, I made her an angel while they were putting the frames together, so she had an angel too. Of course she had never seen it before and loved it! While some of the other kids were still working on their projects, Sally was gazing at hers with her chin on her hand and a radiant smile on her face. So sweet.