Saul starts to go wrong

Exit humility, enter pride! Our story today told about how Saul was supposed to wipe out all the Amalekites, but decided he (or the people—I’m not sure if he was telling the truth or lying on this one) had a better idea, so he spared the best of the sheep and cattle (on paper), and the king.  Then, as if that weren’t enough, he set up a monument for himself as the victor!  (Our “stone monument,” which was blu-tacked to the wall but proved too heavy, reads: “Saul was victorious here.”)

 

Then Samuel shows up, having substituted a red tissue-paper toga for our trademark red shawl or “prophet’s mantle.”  He chides Saul for disobeying the Lord, but Saul doesn’t get it.  Hey, I obeyed the Lord, what’s the problem?  Here everyone was encouraged to make sheep and cow noises, so that Samuel could say, if you obeyed the Lord, what’s that noise?  Oh, the people saved them to sacrifice to the Lord.  What, you think sacrifice is better than obedience?  Think again!  Samuel tells him that God has rejected him as king, and begins to stalk away, before Saul finally gets it.  He grabs Samuel’s robe to keep him from leaving, and it made a wonderfully satisfying tear from top to bottom.  Samuel tells Saul that this is a sign that God is going to tear the kingdom out of his hands and give it to someone more obedient.  End of story, with the hint that we’d find out next week who that someone would be.

Our game did not work well at all.  I remembered it as being difficult three years ago, but I thought, with the kids being older now, it should be easier.  And we only had three kids today (big Parents’ Association event going on).  Only our neurotypical girl was able to succeed at “No sheep left behind,” which consisted of trying to move paper sheep from one bowl to another by sucking them to a straw.  The two kids blew and blew and drooled all over the sheep, but couldn’t grasp that they were supposed to suck.  We tried bringing out a glass of water and letting them suck that up through their straws, which they could both do.  Then tried to explain that they should do the same thing with the sheep.  For the girl, it didn’t seem to compute at all.  The boy did a bit better, gave a couple of sucks, but couldn’t sustain them long enough to actually move a sheep.  Finally they’d been drooled on so much that it was easy to just poke a straw through one and have them carry it to the other bowl that way, ha!

The craft worked much better.  When Saul tore Samuel’s robe, it was destructive.  But we all got pictures of Samuel needing a robe and had to tear one out for him following a shape drawn on the back of gift-wrap paper.

 

I wasn’t in the Bible study time today because of having duty with the kids.  I heard it didn’t go real well—at least one of the non-believers remained convinced that Saul’s idea really was better than all that wasteful killing. :-/