It was not a
brilliant week to forget my camera! Our
story opened with the reminder that the ark was in the hands of the
Philistines. What was inside the ark? We looked inside for review. Is God in there? Nope.
As far as the Philistines were concerned, it was just a beautiful gold
box—after all, they had managed to capture it, hadn’t they? So they put it inside the temple of their god
Dagon as a gift. They closed the door of
the temple (i.e., pulled a folded-up table in front of the two stools holding
the ark and the little monster doll we were using as Dagon). The next morning when they opened the
door—oops, Dagon had fallen over! Must
have bumped him when they were putting the ark in there, huh. So we stuck him down with blu-tack and closed
the door again. The next morning, they
opened the door and were supposed to find him lying belly-down with this head
and hands broken off. It had worked fine
the first time we did this using a cheapo plastic doll from the “dollar
store.” But this time I’d saved the
dollar and used a transformer-type doll that was sitting in the toybox, from
who-knows-where. There was NO WAY I was
going to be able to get the head and hands off!! Managed to get the feet off, that was
all. Not quite so visually
striking! Sigh.
Well,
besides the problem with the idol falling over, there was another mysterious
problem that might or might not be related to the presence of the ark—people
were breaking out in nasty tumors!
(Narrator went around marking different people’s arms with a face-paint
pen). So the people of that city decided
they wanted to send the ark somewhere else.
So they did (move it to another part of the room). Then the people there also started breaking
out in tumors (more face-paint), and the rats were multiplying as well (throw
toy mice into people’s laps). So they
decide they’ve got to get rid of this ark.
The way they decided to do it was to put the ark in a cart (a
wheelchair) and harness two cows who had never pulled a cart before (two boys
in cow horns—yes, it probably should have been girls—very cute, wanted my
camera). The idea was, if these cows
pulled the cart straight back to Israel, then they would know that all these
things that had happened were because of Israel’s God; if they wandered around
every which way, then they could assume that everything that had happened was
just coincidence. But of course they
pulled it straight back, with string tied around their waists and the arms of
the wheelchair. They returned and all
Israel rejoiced and sang a praise song to God.
Our game
was: can you steer the cart as straight as the cows did? Everyone (who wanted to) got to sit in the
wheelchair and drive it from one end of the room to the other. Most of them needed help, but they mostly had
the basic idea.
Then for
craft we made “three-dimensional” cows from craft foam. Hmm, I should have a photo from writing up
the instructions for the leader…
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