First, I should say that when I asked the kids if I could write about this, there was a long pause. I thought it best to ask because I was going to talked about our Sunday morning together and I also wanted to share their art in this space. I wasn’t sure why they might say no, but I wanted to give them the opportunity to respond.
Pause.
Is it going to hurt their feelings?
I had to ask what Beangirl meant. She was worrying about the other children, the ones who didn’t come to Sunday school today. She was worried that they would feel bad. Maybe jealous, maybe just awkward. She didn’t want that.
I explained that this story would be mainly for our friends who lived further away. But if I’m wrong, I hope that no one feels slighted by this. We missed you and we saved the craft and story for when we can be together next week.
That said, Sunday school this week was lovely. No one came and it felt perfect.
Our Sunday School is usually small – somewhere between 5 and 12 kids in a one-room-school set-up. Working with such a small group has been new for me and I’m finding that it can be a beautiful space. Children’s ministry has to be relational when you only have a handful of kids. I’ve loved watching how they work together, all jumbled in together like siblings, with a mix of ages and interests. That’s something that Sunday schools that are divided into school grades miss. Of course, it does make it more challenging to pitch the storytelling and hands-on activities to a wide range of abilities, but I like writing my own programme anyway. Last Sunday, we started a series on Moses, building lapbooks out of file folders and decorating the covers with pictures of Moses’ life from the banks of the Nile to the borders of the Promised Land.
I’d been prepared yesterday to tell the story of the baby in the basket and I was looking forward to wondering with the children about Moses’ family.
Then, when I least expected it, I was given half an hour with my own. Not at home where I’d find a hundred things to do. Not in transit, worrying about the time or the weather or Blue’s stamina. But settled at church, together. The Spouse was in the sanctuary with Plum, and I had the other two all to myself. And vice versa.
We decided not to share the prepared Sunday School material because that would put us one story ahead on the rest of the Sunday school. I thought we might bring out a box of books to dig through together, but they decided that drawing was a better Sunday-morning-sort-of-thing. With last week in mind, they starting drawing their favourite bits of the Moses story.
Beangirl drew Miriam and her tambourine. She loves that bit of the story and you can see why. Big sister making music. She’s even developed a long side-story about big sister Miriam and the infant Moses in which tambourine playing features prominently as a way of calming annoying cries. (I think this might be connected to our Plum’s great love of the hairdryer. It works magic when he is flustered… And yes, we’ve been know to occasionally balance it on top of the radiator and let it run until he drifts off to sleep. Need must, eh?)
Blue drew this.
He had a real twinkle in his eye as he worked on it and he flatly refused to explain it to me until I’d taken a good long look and tried to work it out for myself.
Of course, it is the crossing of the Red Sea from a bird’s eye view. The dots on the right are the Israelites, those on the left are Pharoah’s army and you can see the waves beginning to crash down on them. Castles feature on both sides but, of course, people need places to live. There are also a lot of deserts because that’s where the stories take place.
Bizarre and fantastic. How’s that for Biblical paraphrase?
It felt like such a gift to be able to sit with my children like this, to really focus with them and to hear how they imagine these stories. To see things a little differently together. Sunday mornings are so often work for me. Joy-filled work, but work nevertheless. Yesterday was a gift. Grace-filled and surprising because no one came.
