A Crippled Woman Healed

We took some major "poetic license" here! In order to lengthen the story & increase the participation, we added some hypothetical situations to give background to the theme of the day. First we had the "leader of the synagogue" getting ready to go to the Sabbath meeting. No cooking allowed on the Sabbath, so he had to eat a cold breakfast (a small piece of pound cake, which is considered by some to be Western breakfast food). Then before he went, he needed to make sure his cows were fed and watered. So he pumped some water with the cardboard pump leftover from the marriage at Cana & then led his two handsome cows (steers, maybe!) out to drink. Led them back to their seats & gave them some "hay". Then he could go to the synagogue.

Next we saw another family—father, mother and small son—also eat their cold breakfast and start off. But on the way they encountered a neighbor's sheep with its head caught in a fence. (I have kicked myself for not getting a picture of Sally in the fence—I'll have to ask her to do a make-up pose another day.)

Here it is:

Of course, according to the Law you must rescue a neighbor's animal in distress, so the son ran home to get a hammer & dad took the fence apart to let the sheep out, and then hammered it back together. Then they, too, go to the synagogue.

The next person we see is this woman (girl) who is bent over from the waist and unable to straighten up. She has been that way for 18 years. She is pretty lonely, because people have to practically lie on the ground to talk with her & few people do that. But she likes to go to synagogue, because she can talk to God anyway!

Today, Jesus is speaking at the meeting. Some more poetic license—He is giving a sermon on God's mercy. Everyone agrees with His wonderful message. Then He calls the crippled woman to the front and says, daughter, God wants to show you His mercy today! He lays His hands on her and she stands up straight. She begins to rejoice, but then the leader of the synagogue gives her a hard time. "If you wanted to be healed, you should come some other time, not on the Sabbath! Healing is work & shouldn't be done on the Sabbath!" But Jesus refutes this statement. Come now, He says. Weren't we just talking about mercy? Don't you show mercy to your cattle on the Sabbath, and bring them out to drink? (Synagogue leader looks embarrassed) Or if you saw your neighbor's sheep stuck in a fence on the Sabbath, wouldn't you have mercy on it and help it get free? (family looks embarrassed). God shows us mercy every single day, after all, and wouldn't He want to show mercy to this dear woman today? And give her the best Sabbath "rest" that she has had for 18 years?

The game for today was originally written to be a relay race, but it quickly became obvious that just doing the running—with hands clasping the ankles—was hard enough for almost everyone that just doing it individually, without competition, was challenge enough to make it fun!

The woman in our story stood up straight and tall for the first time in 18 years. How tall are we when we stand up straight? Craft for the day was making individual "growth charts" which were simply measuring tapes stuck to sheets of paper. Then we measured everyone. Unfortunately, I had not anticipated that we would have a new visitor this morning—a 4-year-old boy who was considerably less than 4 feet tall. The only measuring tapes I could find went up to only five feet, and we have several boys taller than that. So I had cut the tapes short, and had 20-80 cm become 120-180 cm. Everyone easily fell within this range except our new little boy, who wasn't all that thrilled to be there in the first place. Mr. Lei worked hard to figure out how to measure him anyway. Thanks Mr. Lei!

I led the Bible study which centered on the idea of mercy. I assigned "homework" which was looking for ways in the coming week to show mercy to someone who doesn't "deserve" it. We're supposed to report back this coming Sunday. Hope we will have at least some people who did the homework!