Two sisters, two choices

The way we do this story, Martha is busy making up a bed in the guest room while Mary is in the kitchen chopping up vegetables. Jesus and His disciples arrive and Mary lets them in & serves them all some water. She never makes it back to the kitchen because she gets too interested in listening to Jesus.

When we did this before, we only had one girl, which worked well enough because then we could choose a mom, who would know how to unfold & make up the cot, to be Martha. This time we had plenty of girls, even though our two neurotypical regulars were absent. So I chose a new visiting volunteer (I love throwing the new volunteers in at the deep end—ha). Well, then the only girl willing to play Mary was Lai Wun, who is the big sister in her family, not the younger sister. There was no way she was going to let herself be demoted to little sister! There was also no way she was going to be able to handle that cot by herself. So we enlisted her mom as a "servant." Whatever it takes! Our Mary was a good sport, handing out empty teacups all around and letting me tease her about not remembering to do so with both hands.

So then Martha finishes the bed and comes down to the kitchen and, where's Mary? Look at this, the vegetables haven't been finished, the meat (some slabs of clay in a plastic bag) hasn't been put in the marinade, the fire (a candle) hasn't been lit—what HAS she done? So then Martha is supposed to try and get Mary's attention by whispering & waving. Mary played her part well; i.e. didn't pay any attention to her but kept looking at Jesus. Then Martha is supposed to come out and tell Jesus to make Mary help. Our Martha apparently didn't want to bother Jesus. She just grabbed Mary by the arm and tried determinedly to drag her bodily back to the kitchen. She was so noisily insistent that most of the adults missed Jesus' statement about Mary choosing the better part. We wound up by saying that the Bible doesn't say how Martha responded to Jesus. We asked what people thought she might have done: flounced back to the kitchen in a huff, apologized and sat down with her sister, or dragged the table out and finished her preparations while listening to Jesus. We all thought she should have chosen #3.

The game was originally a table-setting race, but there were too many kids to do this well, so we just had kids come up one at a time, overlapping as each one finished drawing all the components (plate, cup, napkin, knife, fork, spoon, and bud vase) out of a box and setting up a placemat to match our model. Still a worthwhile & interesting game for all.

Martha of course would have wanted to set a pretty table, with perhaps nicely folded napkins, right? I had planned on two different napkin folding projects, one very simple and one taking a little more concentration. But we were running a bit late so ended up only doing the simple one.

Later I taught the second one to one of the boys (the only one vaguely interested) during the free time.