Our God is Real!

This past Sunday was a huge event; our little group of 20 hosted 40+ visitors from a parents-of-special-needs-kids Sunday School class from Hong Kong.  I had hoped that it would give me an opportunity to learn something of how they run the concurrent special-needs Sunday School class, but somehow during the planning that slipped through the cracks and I ended up leading our usual Sunday activities, just with a much bigger crowd. (=Stressful!) We had to borrow a larger place, that was barely big enough for this crowd.

We did the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal.  Ended up having all our actors be from among the visitors, since they were sitting nearer the front.  We introduced Elijah, and then since even with this large a crowd we couldn’t come up with 450 volunteers, we chose three and hung signs with “150” around each of their necks.  Elijah introduces his challenge, and the people all agree it’s a great idea.  So it starts around 9 in the morning, and we had someone come up and set the paper clock to reflect this.  The prophets of Baal got to go first—took a stool, placed firewood on it, then took a paper cow, tore off its head, and put both parts on top of the firewood.  Then they had to chant: Baal, Baal, come down!  But by 12:00 (by the reset clock), nothing had happened.  So they took (paper) knives and slashed at themselves, hoping to get Baal’s attention that way.  No results.  By 3:00, Elijah was laughing at them (he had this great giggle on cue, I loved it), and asking if Baal had gone to the bathroom or something.  Finally at 6:00 (is that the time of the “evening sacrifice”?  I’m not actually sure), it was Elijah’s turn.  His first move was to build an altar with twelve stones to represent the twelve tribes of Israel.  I already had an altar drawn on a posterboard attached to another stool; we just had to have someone count to make sure there were twelve (there were).  Elijah also put on firewood and a torn cow, but then he went one better—he had someone come with a watering can and soak everything with invisible water. 

Next Elijah was instructed to raise his hands toward heaven and cry out, “Yahweh!”  He raised his hands and shouted, “Yahweh, how are you?” :-)  Yahweh responded by sending an angel to sprinkle fire over the sacrifice.  Everyone cheered and agreed that He was the true God and that He alone should be worshipped.  So Elijah grabbed a sword and chased the “450” prophets away.

After this we split up; the parents got to hear what was apparently a very moving testimony and meaningful discussion, but of course I was up with the kids and missed it.  Somehow I had thought they had said they were bringing 9 kids; in fact they had 15(or was it 16?) on top of our 8.  The room we used was almost completely filled with eight tables pushed together; great for craft but a little squished for the game, which was a kind of “musical chairs” or  “cakewalk” kind of thing.  Elijah chose the right God and got—barbequed beef!  So when the music stopped and everyone sat down, whoever was in the right seat (as determined by a number drawn from a hat) got a snack-sized piece of barbequed beef.  We didn’t have room to take away chairs and have people standing around, so the way we worked it was that whoever got their beef turned their chair in toward the tables (all the other chairs were facing out) while the rest continued to play.  Toward the end it seemed to be taking a lot of time, so the last four or five kids didn’t have to march any more, just wait until their number was called.

In fact, I had planned to do the craft first, so that we could stretch out this game as long as we needed to (not knowing how long-winded the adults might get!), but forgot since game-first is our usual pattern.  Sigh.  Fortunately I had had the foresight to prepare some coloring pages and sets of crayons to fill in the leftover time in case there was some, because there was, after finishing our little “altars” made out of two tissue packets taped together and “stone” stickers added (a lot more than twelve!  I wouldn’t have had enough were it not for the convenient fact that most of the kids didn’t put their stickers on in a close-fitting pattern.  Whew.)

     (no photo right now--my browser just doesn't want to add it.  maybe later)

Only one new family came for this big event, which was on the one hand disappointing, but on the other had just as well as we really didn’t have enough room for any more kids!  We need to be more careful in our planning if there’s a next time!