Jesus walks on water

No particular reason for choosing this story for the first week of February except that I had a sample lesson plan for this that gave me at least a couple of good ideas.  Like the one we started with, where we had one of the volunteers take off her shoes & socks & stand in a basin of water.  We all stood around her and took note of how the water covered her feet; she couldn’t stand on top of the water and neither could anyone else.  Except, today’s story would be about when Jesus did just that.

                We introduced one boy as Jesus.  He was very tired & wanted to take some time to pray.  So He went off to the top of a mountain (teacher’s desk) to pray, and told His disciples to go take a boat across the lake and He would follow them later.  So we laid out a long strip of brown paper as our boat & all the other kids had to sit in it facing one way so they could row together, which we had them do.  In the meantime, we also spread two large sheets of blue paper, for water, along one side of the boat.

                As they are going across the lake, a storm comes up and they are getting scared (everyone rocks from side to side).  But then they see something that really scares them—something is coming toward them on top of the water!  Can people walk on top of water?  Could our volunteer do that this morning?  They thought, it must be a ghost!  Was it a ghost?  No, of course not—it was Jesus.

                Jesus sees that they are afraid, and calls out, don’t be afraid, it’s just me!  So one of the disciples calls back, if it’s really you, tell me to come walk across the water to you.  What do you think Jesus says: “Are you crazy?” or “Sure, come on!”?

He says to come on.  So Peter gets out of the boat and starts walking toward Jesus.  But then he starts looking around him and realizes, he can’t do this!  So he starts to sink (crouch).  Right away Jesus grabs him.  Here’s where I “tweaked” the story just a little bit—though I don’t know if it was really a tweak or not.  Instead of Jesus rebuking Peter’s lack of faith, which is the way I’ve always understood the story, I had Jesus laugh at Peter (in good Cantonese vernacular): “Silly pig, where was your faith?”  But you know—is it clear that this wasn’t in fact Jesus’ tone of voice?  So then Jesus puts His arm around Peter & they walk back to the boat together.  They all start rowing again, and get to their destination, where they get out of boat and back into their chairs.

                Then we looked at our Bible phrase for the day: “Jesus is the Son of God” from John 20:31.  Of course, we noted, this is why Jesus was able to walk on top of the water.

                Next we would tell the story again, but in a slightly different way, and everyone had to help prepare for it.  Between the kids, myself, and the volunteers, we had just enough for each person to get one small picture to color:  either of “pray” (praying hands), a mountain, Jesus, (a group of) disciples, boat, water, “scared” (an alarmed looking person), and Peter.  Then they taped chopsticks to the back of the pictures as handles.  We had one of the volunteers read the story slowly, and whenever someone heard the word for the picture they colored, they had to hold it up.  Which meant they had to listen carefully—easier for some than for others!  They did a little better the second time through, when we also switched some of the pictures around so the one-mention-only pictures went to different kids than the first time.  (When we reported to the parents what we’d done in class that day, we passed out the pictures and made the parents listen & hold them up.  That was fun.)

                Next we played a game about crossing water.  Since we can’t walk on water like Jesus, we need to walk on a bridge or maybe some stepping stones.  Each kid was given several “stones” (paper plates) and could put them down one at a time as he/she crossed the two large sheets of blue paper taped end-to-end.  That was the theory, anyway.  A lot of the kids had trouble staying on task with this one—they’d walk on the first plate or two but then get impatient and just dash the rest of the way across.  Didn’t really want to slow down and force them to get it right, for fear of boring the kids that got it right away.  We did play a second time through, this time with each kid throwing a die first to determine how many stones he/she would get to use.

                Reminder:  why didn’t Jesus need stepping stones to walk on?  Because, as our Bible verse says, Jesus is the Son of God.  We had two sets of each word of this phrase printed out on little boat-shaped pieces of plastic, with holes in them to fit paper-clip hooks into.  The kids divided into two groups and each had to work together to hook the boats up in a line so that the Bible phrase was lined up across the water in a basin.

                We ended up with this fun craft of little “boats” made of celery, peanut butter, and gummy bears.