The First, Worst, Wrong Choice

                This time, when I started by asking the question, what have we been talking about so far, Lai Ting piped up with, “God created the world!”  Woo-hoo!  Made my day!  We reviewed that He also created each of us, and loves us.

                So—when God created the first people, they lived in a beautiful garden.  The first thing we did, then, was to make flowers for the garden, out of chenille stems, and taped them up along the bottom of the whiteboard.  Next we put up six different fruit tree drawings.  God told the people they could eat the fruit off of any of the trees except this particular one.  We reviewed this several times so hopefully everyone had it in their heads which trees were okay & which was the no-no.

                To tell the Bible story, we had one girl come up to the front to be Eve.  At first none of the girls wanted to volunteer; finally one suggested that one of the boys do it.  I said, but he’s a boy, he’ll have to play the man.  Did you want him to be your husband?  Yes.  Okay, then, you have to be the woman.  Voilà, instant volunteer!  So then along comes a snake (another boy, with a sock snake puppet on his arm) and started talking to her.  Do snakes talk?  No, but they must have back in that perfect garden, because the woman didn’t seem all that surprised.  So the snake asks, did God say you couldn’t eat any of the fruit in the garden?  (Did God say that? NO!)  So Eve explains and the snake says, ha, God is lying to you, you won’t die!  (Would God lie to us? NO!)  But he persuades her to try the forbidden fruit.  She pretends to pick and eat some.  Then along comes her husband, and she says, look, I ate some of this fruit and I’m not dead!  Do you want to try some?  (Should he try it too? NO!)  But he does.  And the snake laughs at them.

                Now, God comes to the garden to talk with them.  One of our boys loves to wear the halo, so he got to be God.  The man & woman tried to hide from Him, but there are no good places to hide in our new classroom, so God found them! :-)  He said, why are you hiding from me; did you eat the fruit you weren’t supposed to eat?  They admitted they did.  I skipped the bit about nakedness, and also decided to forgo the specific punishments as too much to digest.  Instead, the snake just went & sat down, while God told the people that He was going to have to punish them for their disobedience by banishing them from the perfect garden.  That they would grow old, and get sick, and die, and all their descendants would die too.  But when they did die, they would be able to see Him face to face again, just like they had in the garden, because God still loved them (hugs them both).

                I tried to get some feedback from the story—what did you learn?  Is it a good thing to obey the rules?  Does God still love you even when you are naughty?  Does your mom/teacher still love you even when you are naughty?  Does your mom/teacher sometimes have to punish you even though they still love you?  So is it a good thing to be obedient?

                Next we played a fun game to reinforce the story.  We sat in a circle & everyone got a paper cup.  We explained that this jar of M&M’s was like the fruit in the garden.  Brown M&M’s were the fruit you weren’t supposed to eat; everything else was okay.  So first, everyone got one M&M in their cup, with one person getting a brown one.  Then we turned on some music and had them start passing the cups.  When the music stopped, whoever had other colors could eat them right away.  But the one with the brown piece had to make a choice.  Either they could go ahead and eat their M&M, but then be out of the game, or they could choose not to eat it, but keep playing and have a chance to get other colors.  We played it enough times so that every kid got the brown piece once, and every single kid made the choice to not eat it.  I was impressed!!  NOT impressed with their ability to pass the cups along smoothly, however.  If we have time to play the game again this Sunday, we will, even though they already “got it,” partly because games with food are popular, and partly to help them work on passing stuff, ha!  I’m sure it will be a useful skill for more games down the road!

                By now time was starting to run out, so we didn’t take time to discuss specific applications to our Bible verse/phrase for the lesson, which was 學習行善 or, “learn to do right” from Isaiah 1:17.  Instead we just passed out copies of the verse written in large “hollow” characters for them to color in.  We’ll talk and pray about applications this coming Sunday.