Kidz Church

I had forgotten until yesterday that, with Mom preaching today, it would be my day to do Kidz Church. Not a big deal really, but....well, I had a day to get ready. So many times when I do Kidz Church alone, things fall sooooo flat. It's just very difficult to keep the attention of so many kids with such a wide age-range (about 3 to 14).

We've got Kidz Church scheduled to follow Foster's six Traditions - we do two months on each stream. We're on the Evangelical Tradition. Was it a coincidence that I recently finished Foster's chapter on this stream? I was going to grab an easy out - show a Veggie Tales or something, but decided not to. The first things Foster said should be done in practicing the Evangelical Tradition is to "get to know our Bibles." Well, how can you possibly do that with a bunch of kids who seem to loose interest at the very sight of a book, not to mention a rather thick book lacking pictures?

I cracked open Calhoun's Spiritual Disciplines Handbook....what a rich resource!! She's got a section on memorizing scripture....so I took that idea, along with all the scriptures and ideas she included in the section....and did what I could to set it in a "kid friendly" framework.

So....we (myself, a friend, and about ten kiddos) gathered around my laptop to look at pictures and talk about things we've memorized. We learned that memorizing stuff can be both easy and fun, and we looked at three reasons why we memorize words out of the Bible: it's a cure for boredom (the whole wandering mind problem), it gives us tools for life (watched a clip from Nim's Island), and...just 'cause it tastes good (we had some reeeeally yummy cookies to help us understand this). Then we worked together on a memory verse: "God, I love your words! I can't stop thinking about them!" Ps. 119:97. We paired the kids up, an older kid with a younger one, and had them work on writing our the verse and going over it with each other....and we played memory games to help us remember the verse.
I'm delighted to say....we had a blast.
Thanks, God.

Loneliness? (again)

"God uses those who can understand the times..." ~J. Kang

Henri Nouwen was a man who "understood the times"...and God did, and still does, use him in the transformation of people's hearts. In the beginning pages of Nouwen's "Reaching Out," he gives a slicing diagnosis of, particularly, American life (though much, I am sure, holds true in other cultures).

We have an innate loneliness inside...and we don't really know what to do with it! We carry a "false expectation that we are called to take each other's loneliness away." By operating on this premise, we enter relationships and "burden others with these divine expectations." The result? Our relationships are excurciating...tiring...suffocating. I think this pervades our culture more than most of us realize.

Nouwen notes that we in America are suspicious of closedness; yet our obsessive openness itself becomes superficial, fun of "empty chatter, easy confessions, hollow talk, senseless compliments, poor praise, and boring confidentialities."

See what I meant by "a slicing analysis"?

He slices through the heart of our culture, giving a clear cutaway view of the contents.

Empty chatter, easy confessions, hollow talk, senseless compliments, poor praise, and boring confidentialities...

How much of my talk, how many of our conversations, consist of these busy nothings? How often do we delight in open, "heart-exposing" conversations? --And we act in these conversations as though it is a beautiful and rare occurance, a seldom and meaningful treat....when in reality, we are only spouting off as we normally do.

Lord, give me grace today to be attentive...to notice empty chatter, easy confessions, hollowtalk, senseless compliments, poor praise, and boring confidentialities. To see the pervasive loneliness around me and within myself. To be quiet...as a means of guarding my inner sanctuary and as a service to others, choosing not to contribute to pointless crusade of conquering lonliness by human means. Help me to stay attentive.

Doodling with Devotion

True prayer goes beyond the boundaries of language.
In a blog posting in August 2007, Jerrell Jobe said, "...though reverence and awe have a place, pray can be playful, interactive and dynamic. Prayer is often filled with words, but prayer is more than words. In fact, words aren’t enough and fall short in expression. At times, prayer may be most fully expressed through non-verbal communication, music, even art and drawing."
I've played around with this kind of doodling prayer--we've even experimented with it in our Kidz Church program. It's fun, engaging, and surprisingly expressive in a way that words sometimes are not. This article is a little something I just found on Christianity Today...

Doodling with Devotion

How the simplest art can become a form of prayer.

Sybil MacBeth, a mathematics instructor by profession, doodler and dancer by avocation, has written, and doodled, a daring devotional. Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God chronicles her experiments in intercession and challenges readers to take pens and paper in hand and, well, intercede.
Although the daughter and granddaughter of artists, MacBeth was convinced by her own ugly artwork that something "had gone awry in the tossing of the genetic salad." Her point: The absence of skill presents no barrier to an individual's discoveries linking doodling and prayer. That's because prayer involves trust and being real before God.
MacBeth's doodling discoveries came from a crisis. About three years ago, a litany of cancers—lung, brain, breast—struck among family, friends, and colleagues. The suffering within her circle was overwhelming. Worry became her starting point—but not her stopping point. Even now, she writes, "worry invites me to prayer."As a teacher facing a summer off, MacBeth had no papers to grade but instead possessed what she calls a "critical prayer list." Going to the back porch, she doodled a random shape and wrote a name in its center. "The name belonged to one of the people on my prayer list. I stayed with the same shape and the name, adding detail and color to the drawing. Each dot, each line, and each stroke of color became another moment of time spent with the person in the center."
When she sensed the time was right, she moved to another part of the page and drew another shape and put another name in its middle. She embellished it with lines, dots, colors. She continued drawing new shapes and names until her friends and family formed a colorful community of designs. "To my surprise," she writes, "I had not just doodled—I had prayed."
MacBeth has been leading workshops in the U.S. about praying in color for two years. Her book contains balloons, labyrinths, vegetables, clovers, triangles, kites, quilts, calendars with prayer requests and names, and purposefully shaped squiggles. She recommends 15 to 30 minutes for the process, half spent in drawing and the other half in carrying the visual memories or actual images throughout the day.
Instead of being a prayer warrior, she calls herself "a prayer popper," one who prays in fits and spurts with "half-formed pleas and intercessions, and bursts of gratitude and rage."
MacBeth is transparent, accessible, and human. She exercises what she calls spiritual imagination as she works on, in, and through prayer.
She trusts herself enough to experiment, mess up, and try again in prayer. She trusts God enough to guide her as she falters, succeeds, and grows stronger. Her book emboldens others to trust their instincts, too."

Reign Over Me

Just watched this with Sam and Mom....a great, great movie. Heavy. It was interesting to see the relational issues and how communication plays such a vital role. Interesting how Charlie knew he needed help but avoided it so passionately. The very things he really needed to remember and talk about were the things he avoided thinking about--but so much of his life was centered around not remembering his family in ways directly related to things that happened when they were still alive.
We naturally avoid pain--but pain is often how we grow.