Fifth commandment, and a welcome break

It was good to be back with the Merciful Love crowd this Sunday! I was still feeling pretty wiped out from all the drama of Bruce's hospitalization. So I was very thankful to be able to just dump the responsibility for the story in Kevin's capable lap. He'd led a story on the Prodigal Son a couple of years ago, and that is the story of choice for the theme of "Honor Your Father and Mother." Doesn't Ka Ho look the part of the young man living high on the hog on his father's money?

Our game was "pass the hats"—one "parent's hat" and one "child's hat" were passed around the circle as music played. When it stopped, whoever was the "child" had to kneel and pur a cup of tea for the "parent." The crowd was a little too big so that there were a lot of repeats before some of the kids got one chance to be in the game. But we hadn't wanted to restrict it to just the kids, because it's part of the fun when some adult has to reverse the roles and kneel before a child to honor them with this tea ceremony.

When we'd done this commandment before, it happened to fall on Father's Day, so the craft was obvious. However, it didn't work out that way this year, so we needed something different. One thing that we wanted to bring out in the discussion on the story was that neither of the two sons in the parable really believed in or appreciated the depth of their father's love for them. So we honored the parents' love by making them Olympic style gold medals (chocolate) with stickers on the back reading 愛心獎 (love award), and then had a little ceremony awarding them to the parents/caregivers. Mrs. Wong won two gold medals!

I really enjoyed leading the Bible study time. We talked about how bad they would feel if their children didn't believe they loved them, or didn't want a real relationship with them but only wanted what they could get out of them. We then pointed out how Jesus had actually told this parable to help us get to know our heavenly Father—and do you suppose He feels bad when we don't want to have a love relationship with him? No one gave me a verbal answer, but everyone looked a bit stunned at the thought. A good concept for them to chew on during the coming week!

This morning Bruce was back with us. He managed the four flights of stairs just fine with his crutches! We didn't have a regular program; again a team of three helpers from a church in Hong Kong watched the kids (along with Bruce who isn't up to a lot of running around in the heat yet), and the rest of the adults went to an outdoor café in a nearby park for some drinks and conversation.

Trying to continue on the theme we sort of began last week, my plan was to discuss how to develop a heart relationship with our heavenly Father. I was surprised to find how many didn't seem to find it a difficult concept to pour out their hearts to God (Psalm 62:8). Just in case their words were more confident than their practice, however, I did go ahead and pass out little cards with some suggestions for getting started, such as, "Heavenly Father, I feel sad about…I don't know what to do about…I am fearful of…I don't understand…"etc.

Another thing that came out during the discussion, which we started by asking, "to whom do you turn when you need to share your heart with someone?" was how much these parents are able to trust and share freely with one another. This kind of openness is not terribly common in the Chinese church, and it's truly a blessing!

Commandment Four

As I mentioned last week, I couldn't be there for this past Sunday's service, so have no specific highlights to share. Just the general outline, for posterity's sake:

The story we chose to illustrate proper Sabbath-keeping was the gathering of manna in the wilderness. Moses was introduced, and then all the rest of the kids shouldered their "baggage" and followed him around the room. The point was made that this was desert country without enough food to eat. So everyone starts giving Moses a hard time & he prays to God for help. God promises there will be food in the morning. Moses conveys this to the people, and they all go into the side bedrooms and crowd onto the beds to "sleep". Meanwhile the leader scatters a bunch of little foam squares over the floor in the living room. The kids "wake up" the next day & come out & gather it. What does it taste like? Wafer cookie squares passed out to everyone.

What about tomorrow? the people want to know. Go to bed and see! So they all go to bed. The next "morning," they find twice as many squares to gather. More wafers to eat.

Someone asks if this will happen every day. Moses says, almost every day, but did you notice there was twice as much today as yesterday? That is because tomorrow is the Sabbath, when we are not supposed to do any work, including gathering food. You have enough for tomorrow, so you can enjoy sleeping in!

Everybody goes back to bed. But then a couple of kids get up before the others and go out looking for manna. Of course they don't find any. Moses scolds them and says they need to learn to trust God to take care of them, and enjoy their rest. God knows their need for food, and He also knows their need for rest, which is why He created the Sabbath. They eat some more wafers and agree that from now on they will trust God & not just themselves.

Craft came before game time for this lesson. Each child received a box drink (sweetened soy milk, a favorite of all) plus a wrapped rectangle of pressed seaweed (another favorite treat—of theirs, not mine!), and wrapped them together in gift wrap, then labeled it with their own names. Then these were placed aside.

For the game, there were six cooperative tasks involving the stack of stools we use as extra seating: line up ten stools in a row, arrange them in a circle, turn them upside down, flip them back over and stack them by two's, separate them again & wipe them down with cloths, and finally, stack them in one pile and store them in the storeroom. After each task, they were to sit down and pretend to sleep, signifying six days of work. The responsibility after waking up on the seventh day was enjoy God's gift of leisure by opening their gift-wrapped packages and eating and drinking! Like I said, I wasn't there, but I would guess that this was a popular game, especially the ending!

I will be there for the next commandment, hooray! Bruce is safely out of the hospital; this time the hip seems to be holding together nicely, thank the Lord!

Commandment Three

Time for a blog update. It will be sketchy, as I wasn't there. My husband had hip replacement surgery on Friday June 18^th over in Hong Kong so I have been there (here) with him.

We used the story of Job to illustrate this commandment about not using the Lord's name inappropriately. Highlights would be "Satan" in his/her red mask bragging about how many people he has led astray, and "God" in his/her halo pointing out righteous Job. So then of course the trials begin—pictures of his flocks & herds & children are systematically carried away by armed raiders, or destroyed. Finally Job ends up with sores (bandaids) all over his arms & legs. (Handy that this was summer; more flesh exposed!). Then his friends come and lay into him about how he must be a great sinner or God would never treat him like this.

Eventually God appears and scolds the friends for using His name wrongly, by saying untrue things about His dealings with us. Job receives new flocks & herds & children.

For the game we had little clip art pictures of donkeys, camels, oxen and sheep in various numbers, masking-taped face-down on plastic blocks & evenly distributed into two plastic bags. Players divided into two teams, each with a "Job". The other players, relay-style, would take a block from the bag & run it to Job, where they would peel off the tape to find the animal, and make a check next to that category. First team to restore at least one of all four kinds of animal to Job was the winner. This wasn't original; I found it on a website somewhere & if I could remember where I would give it credit. Sorry!

Craft was obvious. Job's friends did a lousy job at being a comfort to him when he was sick. So the kids practiced a much better way to behave toward sick friends—creating get-well cards. They made them for my husband! Kevin, who has been staying at our home to cat-sit, collected them to bring back & have there to surprise Bruce when he got back home.

But I ended up bringing them here to the hospital instead. I rushed home to Macau yesterday (Wednesday) to arrange things for this Sunday, among other errands, and then rushed back to Hong Kong this morning to be here for Bruce's second surgery, since his too-thin thigh bone fractured sometime post-op. So I won't be at Merciful Love for the next commandment either…

Commandment Two

For our story about not worshipping idols, we chose the account of Daniel's three friends and the fiery furnace. Started out by re-introducing King Josiah from last week's story & recalled that God was not going to punish Judah until after he died. So now—he's died. (Gets plonked back onto chair.) God indeed punished the people with exile to Babylon. (Two guys with swords escort everyone around the room.)

The king of Babylon wasn't a humble guy like Josiah. In fact, he was so proud, he didn't want to be just respected, he wanted to be worshipped! (This is my "free" version of the Bible story, which does not actually say what the image was that the people were supposed to worship. I'm just guessing it was likely an image of the king himself.) So we dressed a second child in the same purple-tissue-paper robe and gold-paper crown as the king, and had a couple of adults lift her onto a stool. (We're short of boys these days!)

During the announcement of the "rules of worship" we played snippets of each type of musical instrument we mentioned, from a little toy keyboard. Of course then the three friends didn't bow to the idol when the bad guys played the music when the friends were near the statue. So they got thrown into the "furnace" which was one of our side bedrooms, with paper flames taped along the sides.

When the king peeked into the furnace and saw something he didn't expect, we had him tell everyone to come look. Which gave the pre-cued volunteer the chance to slip into the "furnace" from the back via the connecting bedroom—picking up a halo for himself along the way. :-)

When the king called the friends to come out, he had to sniff at them all to see if they smelled like smoke. (They didn't.)

Again, a slight poetic re-write: we ended the story with the king declaring that Yahweh was clearly the right God to worship, so we wouldn't be needing that statue anymore (pull it down).

Although unlike idols, God is invisible, He still showed His power over the flames. Just like an invisible puff of air can blow out a candle flame, right? Game time had everyone blowing up (with or without help) balloons and then aiming them at candles to try and blow them out. Most of the kids got the right idea about pointing the balloon in the right direction and letting the air out, but it was harder to convince them that they needed to let it out fast. The "slow leak" stuff didn't do the job! It was fun trying though!

For a craft we made what one of the kids called "fire popsicles." (Popsicles translate as snow sticks; so these were then "fire sticks"). Cut-down juice-boxes wrapped with "flame" paper; a hole on the bottom letting you slide a popsicle stick up & down with three cutout boys glued to the end, going in & out of the furnace. A lot of work to prepare the materials (drank a lot of juice last week!), but easy to assemble on the day & everyone liked them.

Commandment One

First thing to do was to have one of the kids paste the first commandment up on the big "tablets" at the front of the room. Only as I was having him read it out did I realize that I had made a typo & written 耶和話 for耶和華. Oops!

We told the story of King Josiah and the discovery of the scroll in the temple that made him realize how far the nation had gone away from God, and the danger of having done so. That morning I had put several drawings of altars or "totem poles" up on the walls, which were used during the story to illustrate how the land was filled with worship of false gods. So at the end the kids had to take them all down and tear them up.

Our game followed the theme of "destruction"—a relay race with two stacks of fairly simple puzzles that had to be completely taken apart, no pieces still stuck together, before the next person in line could go. Should have been a good game but between two adults needed to receive the puzzle pieces into separate bags (so we wouldn't have to sort them all out at the end), and one to keep the kids waiting in line instead of running up & surrounding the players as they like to do, no one was watching the ends of the lines. So somehow they didn't come out even & we never did figure out who had been left out of the race. Sigh.

We made little "phylacteries" for craft time which worked great three years ago, but this time I used the wrong kind of paper, I guess; the glue just didn't want to stick it together well enough. The kids had these flapping-open boxes bobbing on their foreheads…I am not batting 1.000 on crafts these days!!

Receiving the Law on Mount Sinai

We started our story with a little question-and-answer time. We had seen how God had taken care of the Israelites—besides God, who takes care of YOU? (mom & dad) So, what should you do to show them how thankful you are? (be obedient) What are some things you should do to be an obedient child? Here each one had to come up with an example, or, for the non-verbal kids, had to nod agreement to a possible suggestion. Fun to get the kids of all types involved & thinking!

Next question: is it important to obey God, too? (yes) What should we do to be obedient? The good thing is, He tells us through His Word, and in today's story we will see how He first told His people about His law.

Okay, so the Israelites have been traveling for some time now (everybody gets up & follows the designated Moses once around the room) and are now in the Sinai wilderness. There is a tall mountain there (a tall, double-sided stepladder), called Mt. Sinai. God has told Moses He is going to come down to meet him on the mountain. Since God is coming so near, everyone had to be clean & nicely dressed & ready to greet him. So first, everyone had to line up & each received a washcloth to dip in a basin of water, to wash their faces. Then all the boys got neckties to wear, and all the girls got "corsages" (more like boutonnieres)—rather than fussing with pins for those, I used masking tape which worked fine & was much quicker & safer!

A white sheet was then held hovering over the ladder by a couple of tall helpers. "God" shook the ladder & blew a horn & climbed up the backside, then called for Moses to come up. He did & then we had to all count to 40, since he was up there that many days & nights. Then he came down holding a clay tablet bearing the "ten commandments" (actually just the Roman numerals I-X). Moses announced to the people that next week, we would start studying those commandments one at a time.

For game time, everyone had to sit down while we blu-tacked the numbers 1-10 in random order on the walls & floor. Numbers were then drawn one at a time. For the first number, everyone was in the race to find & grab the right card. Once any person had a card, however, he/she could not go for another until everyone had "won" one. It went well. A key was making everyone sit back down between each number.

Our craft was making clay tablets like the one Moses had brought down from the mountain. We had pre-cut "double tablet" shapes. Everyone got a lump of quick-drying clay to roll out to smoothly cover the shapes, using wooden or plastic dowels (I had some of each on hand; just enough!). Then they were to "carve" the numbers 1-10 into the clay.

When I was going over this with the day's leader, she said she really wasn't familiar with Roman numerals. We foreigners think "ten commandments" and automatically think Roman numerals but hey, you know what? I bet that even if they were numbered on those original tablets, it wasn't in Roman numerals! So we went "indigenous" and used the Chinese numerals: 一﹐二﹐三﹐四﹐五﹐六﹐七﹐八﹐九﹐十﹗Sorry no photos though; the numbers didn't photograph well in the white clay.

I went back & tried again to take a picture; here we go:

I heard the Bible study generated some good discussion. One interesting point being that God obviously wanted to communicate with His people, which their Chinese gods do not. (All religions are NOT just the same!)

Crossing the Red Sea

Today's story was pretty short—but that was okay because craft time was loooong.

We got all the kids kitted out with their "luggage" (carrier bags with towels inside) and they walked around the room following "God" (a volunteer in a halo), who held aloft a pillar of cloud for the first round (daytime) and a pillar of fire for the second (nighttime). Then we had them "camp" by the shore of the Red Sea, which was two blue-patterned sheets on the floor. Our adult "Egyptians," decided to chase after the trapped Israelites, so God told Moses to lift up his rod. He did so & two other volunteers lifted up the sheets to the right and to the left. All the kids walked through to the other side. Then the Egyptians came along, Moses put up his rod again, and they got the sheets draped over them. Much rejoicing by the Israelites, end of story.

For game time, paper war chariots were fastened to the shower curtain in the bathroom. Kids took turns "drowning the Egyptians" with squirt guns.

Craft time was a somewhat complicated art project depicting the parting of the sea.

Each of the steps was fairly simple; there were just a lot of them. One of the last steps was to punch holes along each side of the two layers of the project to sew them together. That's what the directions in the craft book said. When I translated them for the leader, I suggested it would be better to pass the layers out pre-punched. But then when I did the sample myself, I discovered that I had to glue some things on over some of the holes. So I told the leader to ignore my translation. We didn't have enough hole punchers for everyone, but since everyone wasn't going to be ready at exactly the same time, they could just go to a couple of designated helpers to get the holes punched when needed. Well. I think that would have worked brilliantly if we'd had good old-fashioned scissor-style hole punchers. Instead I had these stapler-style things that just didn't have wide enough openings to get through all the two layers once we'd added the sand and the sea. It was very awkward. One of the parents figured out you could just sew it together without holes if you pushed the (blunt) needle hard enough, so that's basically what we did. What thrilled me so much about all this was that NO ONE made any whiny remarks about how this should have been thought through better. The attitude of every single person there was, "okay, let's work together and figure this out."

I LOVE MY CHURCH!