Out of the mouths of babes, part the thousandth.

As we were learning about the Christmas story in the older Sunday School group, I decided to make some Old Testament-New Testament links by using the book The Animals' Christmas, which makes links between the Nativity and Isaiah 11 (the Peaceable Kingdom).  The book concludes with a group of animals, both predators and prey, around the manger (see picture).  I finished reading, and started the wondering questions by saying "I wonder what you can see in this picture."  I hoped they would start naming the animals, leading us to a discussion of the fact that there were animals both eating and eaten around the manger, and thus to a discussion of Jesus as the prince of peace.

This is what happened instead.

"God," one kid said.

"You can't see God," someone else said.  "How do you know he's there?"

"Can you see love, or hope?" I asked.

"Maybe the beam of light is God," the original child responded.

Safe and happy.

Last Sunday, we did the story of Jesus and the teachers in the temple in the older Sunday School group.

The kids had some wonderful ideas about what Mary, Joseph and Jesus would have been thinking and feeling at different parts of the story, as well as why Jesus would have chosen to go to the Temple instead of somewhere else in Jerusalem.

One child suggested that the Temple was where Jesus felt "safe and happy."  So I grabbed on this and used it as my theme for introducing our activity (which was to use the various art supplies that were out - clay, paint, felt tips, craft sticks, pipe cleaners, etc., to make a picture or model of a place that is special to us.)  I told children to make or draw "a place that makes you feel safe and happy."

Several children made very elaborate paintings of their own houses.  One did a brightly coloured painting of the trampoline in her back garden.  One did her grandmother's house and told me her grandmother had died last year.  I happened to be doing a painting of my late grandfather's house as well, so this gave us a chance to talk about bereavement, which was unexpected but pastorally important.  Two boys, who are brothers, made sculptures of each other (a person can be your safe and happy place, can't they?).  And one boy did a 3-d model of the Garden of Eden.

People, this is why I do this job.