Commandment Nine

Well, we more than made up for our low attendance of the past couple of weeks! "Just" eight kids, but three visitors from Hong Kong, who come once a month as volunteers, and six American visitors from our home church in Rapid City, South Dakota, here to teach at an English day camp.

Our story was about Naboth and his vineyard. (A plate of grapes Naboth stood over with his watering can.) The one that King Ahab wanted for himself but couldn't have because he at least did know last week's commandment about not stealing! So he went home and pouted. His wife Jezebel had no such conscience concerning God's commands, so she arranged for him to be hauled before the judge (visitors beware—you WILL be recruited!) and have some people accuse him of blaspheming God and the king. Then we all "stoned him to death" with wadded newspapers. When Jezebel told her husband it was all taken care of, he knew better than to ask too many questions. He just went & dumped out Naboth's grapes, put in his own bunch of broccoli (the Bible says he wanted it for a vegetable garden) and stood over it with his watering can. End of story.

For game time, we had a bunch of true or false statements stuck face down to the blackboard for the kids to take turns choosing. If it was true and they knew it, they got an M&M. If it was false and they knew it, they could win their candy if they corrected the statement. With enough coaching, everybody won. Even the boy who kept insisting that the statement "big sister Mary is a boy" was true. We used a lot of statements that had to be verified on the spot. Things that I didn't know for sure would be true or false when I wrote them, such as, "Ka Hei is wearing a red shirt," or "Sally is wearing earrings today." I was pretty much positive that I was not a boy though!

Thanks to Pauline Yeung for the craft idea. We said, Jezebel had those worthless fellows in the story tell lies about Naboth on purpose. But a lot of times, when we bear false witness about others, it's because we have not taken the time to look carefully at what the truth really is. You need to see things clearly before you talk about others—in other words, you need to have your glasses on!

Normally when we have visiting volunteers, we have them watch the kids in the side bedrooms while the adults have their Bible study in the living room. But we had too many visitors to squeeze them all into those rooms with the kids. Having the Americans join the Bible study would be too overwhelming, though, with the translation that would be needed. So, the perfect solution: the Hong Kong volunteers got to join the Bible study, while the Americans and I took the kids to a nearby park and bought them all something to drink. It was HOT, but that was okay.

While we were out there we also got all the kids to sign Kevin's birthday card, which we presented to him when we got back.

Commandment Eight

Low attendance again, but it really didn't spoil the fun! To illustrate "thou shalt not steal," we used the story of Zaccheus. How coming to know Jesus made him decide not to steal anymore. I embroidered the story rather elaborately to draw it out & get more kids directly involved. Had him sitting at his tax table & someone coming up & asking how much tax they owed. He (she) consulted the local income tax table and determined it should be three pieces of silver. A sign was held up to this effect while Zaccheus put finger to his lips, and then said to the hapless taxpayer: "Four pieces of silver." We said, the people knew what was going on, but what could they do about it? If someone dared to call him on it (we had someone come do this), he could call out the soldiers & have them arrested (two kids with swords haul the person off), and they'd have to pay at least twice as much to get out of jail!

Well, then one day nobody is coming to pay taxes, how come? Hm, there's a big crowd over there—Jesus is in town! Zaccheus tries to push through the crowd to see him, but not only is he very short, no one likes him so all are determined to make it difficult. So he climbs this tree…

Jesus stops and asks to come to his home for dinner. So Zaccheus invites a bunch of his tax collector friends, and they all sit around a table eating crackers, with Zaccheus sitting next to Jesus. Then Zaccheus bangs on his water glass and gets up & announces he will not steal from anyone again, and in fact will pay back whatever he has stolen. Jesus congratulates him and blesses him.

On the theme of "stealing," we had each child go out of the room one at a time; each time we "stole" a different person from the group and had him/her go into yet another room. Then the player had to come out & guess who had been stolen. This was a new one, and fun. Craft was a work sheet titled "what has been stolen?" with various pairs of drawing with one part missing in the second drawing of each set—a wheel on a car, a spoon at a table setting, etc. Relatively easy, but it was about time for an easy craft, I think!

Commandment Seven

For our story that clearly shows the folly of committing adultery, we used David and Bathsheba. David is on the roof & sees this beautiful woman next door taking a bath (in a large plastic storage bin). Should he keep looking? NO! But what does he do? He whips out a pair of binoculars (two toilet paper rolls taped together) for a closer look. He really wants to know who she is so he calls a servant up & gives him the binoculars. Servant says it's Uriah's wife & he is dispatched to go bring her. She gets out of the "tub" and puts on a bathrobe (over her clothing, of course!) & comes to David. They sit on the recliner together and are briefly covered with a blanket. Bathsheba was one of our neurotypical girls, & was acting very flirtatious in the recliner. Our autistic David was totally oblivious to what was supposed to be going on. Just as well!

Bathsheba goes home, but soon sends a servant to tell David she is pregnant. Our servant, Sally, doesn't speak much, so I told her she could just gesture to describe a large tummy. But Mrs. Chu really wants to encourage her to talk more (which is good) so she was trying to insist she say "she's having a baby." But for some reason this struck Sally so funny she couldn't get a word out. Every time she opened her mouth she would start shaking with silent laughter. Occasionally she would just make the gesture. It was very cute and funny to watch! Eventually we decided she'd communicated well enough, so David sends for Uriah to "talk about how the fighting is going," (looking at a map together). Then David tells him to go home but instead he sits on the couch with the servant under a blanket. David then has to go with plan B, which is to send a letter by the hand of poor Uriah himself, to Joab to tell him to arrange Uriah's death.

This taken care of, David plays the benefactor: oh, his loyal soldier is dead and left a pregnant widow—he will take care of her by marrying her! (they march down the room to the wedding march) He may think he's gotten away with this, but soon Nathan the prophet comes & tells him he's going to be punished by having people steal his wives, and there will always be killing among his descendants. He immediately admits his sin, so at least is spared being put to death himself. End of story.

Our game was three-legged racing to illustrate the truth that a married couple is meant to walk through life together. I had brought an old leg-warmer to use as a simple way to join the legs of each pair. Someone asked, are you sure it's going to be big enough for two people's legs? I said I was sure, because I had checked by putting it around both of my "sturdy" calves the previous evening—and then of course the phone rang…(true story)!

For craft, following the wedding theme, each child had a cartoon couple on which to stick various parts of fancy wedding outfits, in the correct order. I was surprised at all the neckless couples we ended up with—I thought the kids had done better with this craft three years ago. Maybe the parents helped more the first time? It was fun for everyone though.

Commandment Six

An exhausting morning at Merciful Love! We had eleven kids, & eleven adults. Pretty crowded, but we still fit!

For our story, we had a condensed & slightly edited version of II Samuel 2 & 3. First we introduced Israel's first king, Saul. But because he was not loyal to God, God chose someone else to take his place, David. But because David remembered the commandment "thou shalt not kill," he was willing to wait for God's time to become king. When Saul finally died, though, some people felt that his son Ishbosheth should be the new king. One country, two kings—what happens? War! So each king chose a general from among the other kids—Joab for David, Abner for Ishbosheth.

Next we introduced Joab's little brother Asahel who wasn't very skilled in warfare but was very brave and very fast. He starts chasing Abner, who also would rather not kill such an innocent, and tries to persuade him to go chase somebody else. But Asahel doesn't listen, he catches up to Abner, & gets killed.

War drags on for a while, and finally (here's my major editing job) Ishbosheth gets impatient and accuses Abner of being lazy and useless. Abner takes offense and defects to David. Of course then Ishbosheth is in big trouble & he dies before too long. So now there's just one king, and peace in the land. Everybody's happy except—whom? Joab, of course. Not only is his little brother dead, but he has to be partners with the guy who killed him! So under the guise of "discussing business," he arranges a private chat with Abner, and kills him.

When David hears, he is angry, and explains to Joab that while killing in war is one thing, killing someone from sheer jealously & dislike is quite another. Joab "gets away with murder" by protesting that Abner was too dangerous a potential traitor. But David demonstrates that he did not condone the murder by personally arranging for Abner's burial (his being covered with a blanket, that is) and commanding everyone in the room to cry for him.

Game time: we heard in the story that in war there usually has to be killing, but wouldn't it be nice to have battles where people didn't have to die? So we battled for the championship of pillow-fighting on a low balance beam. Whoever fell off first was the loser in a double-elimination tournament, which we never quite finished with all those kids, but everyone got at least two turns. One reason we didn't finish was that everyone's balance was so good! It was really hard to get anyone to fall off the beam! In some of the contests, I had to resort to tickling (both kids at once) to speed up the process!

Craft time was horrendous. The idea was good; we said that the opposite of killing was healing, & set out to make stethoscopes out of drinking straws & a bottle cap. The problem was, you had to string this all together by getting the yarn through these drinking straws. I had done one at home and it went very easily. However, I had used the heaviest large-eyed needle in my collection, and it would fall through the straw easily, even when, as with the first straw, there were two strands of yarn to draw through. Most of the needles I had were much lighter, and it was very difficult. Either we needed heavier needles, or lighter string, which I certainly could have managed had I realized the problem. Once again, I was humbly amazed at how accepting everyone was of the mess-up. I was by far the most frustrated person of the entire group!

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…