Sunday, March 4, 2012

BLessed are the Merciful

Finally got a couple of pictures today. Simply had to, as this is one of my favorite stories in our series.

We first introduced Israel’s first King, Saul, complete with crown and fancy paper robe. Unfortunately, he was not a real good king, so after a little booing and hissing we had one of the kids stick a big masking-tape ‘X’ on his chest. Saul had a loyal servant named David, who was a much more godly man. Applause, and then we had another child make a star out of masking tape for his chest.

David fought battles for Saul (runs around room poking at people with his foam sword), and then would hand over the spoils to the king (gives moneybag to Saul, who was disappointed to discover that the money was inedible…). So, did Saul love David? Well, he did at first but then he became quite jealous of him, and wanted to kill him! Saul stands up and yells, Kill him! So David and his men had to flee. They need some food for the journey, so they stop and visit the priest (man in red shawl), who gives them a bag of bread. They continue running and finally hide in a cave (in the bathtub, behind the drawn shower curtain).

Now Saul and his men are in hot pursuit. They get as far as the priest’s and ask if he has seen him. The priest says yes, and I gave them some food for their journey. Saul says, kill him! A flash of the sword and the priest falls over dead. They keep running around looking for David. Finally, Saul has to go to the bathroom! He goes into a cave for privacy—the very cave in which David is hiding!

The three inside the tub discuss whether this is God’s opportunity to kill Saul, but David won’t do it. He reaches out from behind the curtain (took a teeny bit of persuasion to keep him from opening the curtain) and cuts a corner off his paper robe. Saul finishes his business and heads back out to seek David. David comes to the door of the cave, waves the corner of the robe and says, look, Saul! I could have killed you, but I didn’t! Saul apologizes, and stops chasing David.

The instructions for this week’s game made the leader laugh out loud: since we don’t want our kids chasing anyone around with scissors, our game will not involve trying to cut pieces off anyone’s clothing. :-) Instead, we will just try to grab clothespins off someone’s clothing. The kids lined up on stools, shoulder to shoulder—they were supposed to stay put on the stools, but it did get a little rowdy, oh well. One of the adults donned a jacket with about 25 clothespins all over it, and scurried back and forth along the line while the kids grabbed for the pins. We played it twice, the second time with a usually very timid mom as the volunteer. She did great, running as fast as she could and even hiding one of the clothespins under her arm. :-)

For the craft, our teenage leader did a very good job of explaining that the Bible mentions that David actually regretted his merciful act of cutting off part of Saul’s robe as not being merciful enough! Perhaps if he would have had the chance, he would have sewn the piece back on for Saul. He didn’t have that chance, so we will do that for him! Everyone got a “garment” with a corner cut off; the fabric was loosely woven enough so that they could use relatively blunt darning-type needles to repair the corner with yarn. When we did this years ago, I had actually sewn up “three-dimensional” garments with seams. I dreaded having to do that again this year when I realized, duh, just one layer in garment shape is fine, no one is going to complain! So here’s how they turned out:

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