06 August 2006 19:29
friday dawned bright and clear. (whilst i cannot say with certainty that this was so, i'm more certain than i was of the previous day's dawn since my alarm went off at 0620 this time).Friday 28 July 2006
our object of the morning was the final day of bible school at joyland and abrahms. philip and i spent the morning trying to hash out a plan for the days' lesson. the material called for a discussion of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ; but philip wanted to make sure the lesson had a pretty strong kick.
in the long run we decided to mix passion play and lecture. (long run translates as "right before school started". not having any practice beforehand leaves more room for the Holy Spirit, right?). everybody piled into the church for devos and the theme song. devos were led by philip, who told the story of Yessuh—since Noah had the good habit of saying "yes" to God he should be called Yessuh instead of Noah. go ahead a groan, but he did a really good job.
<tangent> i have a very good relationship with my comfort zone. it keeps me comfortable, and in turn i don't force it to stretch. that aside, i also fully recognize that there are some areas of my life (particularly in relation to my outreach) that could use a good stretching. so i willingly (although that's somewhat misleading) place myself in situations where i get stretched. for a non-spiritual example let's look at jamaica's public transportation system. i've ridden it before (but always with friends who had experience). i know people who have ridden quite a few hours/miles by themselves on public transport here. that doesn't change the fact that i'm much more used to cruising around with my honda civic at my beck and call. i also knew i was perfectly capable of making my way from kingston to ridge without personal transportation. but none of this changed the fact that i was never going to get around to doing it just for the fun of it, or the fact that i would actively avoid going anywhere where i had to use public transportation. so i didn't press too hard when paul told me it would be "inconvenient" to let me have a company car for five days...i put myself in a situation where, if i wanted to see my friends in st. elizabeth, then i was going to have to get there by public transportation. now that trip has come and gone and the ice is broken and i have added random trips by coaster and route taxi to st elizabeth to my list of "comfort envelope friendly" activities. it's on the fringe to be sure, but at least it's inside the stupid envelope.
for a spiritual example let's look at vacation bible school--or more specifically, little kids. i like little kids (provided they're not brats...which includes an alarmingly few number of jamaica children incidentally enough). i don't mind them, i don't think we should lock them away until they turn 21, and i even don't mind playing with them. on the other hand, most of them seem to mind me. maybe it's my fearsome visage. maybe my grin comes across as feral. maybe kids can sense my insecurity like dogs can sense fear. because one thing's for sure, i'm insecure around kids. don't know what to do with the things. i simply don't have the proper reactions (learned or instinctive) on how to respond to a child depending on what it's doing. granted, on watching the PIM (partners in mission) team interact with children i came to the realization that i could improve my skills by copying what they did. so essentially, the task was demoted from fully "impossible" to merely "daunting". (i have a lot to learn, and meagre experience to build on).
by logical extension of that paragraph, you should be able to ascertain that vbs would rank right around having a root canal on my list of favorite things to do. a situation over which i have little control and no small fear of the unknown. however, i know that i have all the necessary faculties with which to teach bible school...mostly i'm just scared. plus, my siblings were part of of a PIM team two or three years ago. stephanie doesn't count (girls are supposed to be able to handle kids, it's God-ordained, or... something. i'll stop digging ;) ), but if kyle can teach bible school then by all that's right I can teach bible school! or so i told myself as i sealed my fate and told philip i'd help him out--recognizing this as one of those situations where my comfort zone was too small for its (okay my) own good.
so diana and i dropped in on bethel mennonite's vbs for their first day on 17 july. and it was quite painless, mostly because i was not-needed...all i did was sit in the front and glare at the trouble-makers while the teacher taught. and since i was only there for one day, any true responsibility fell on carmen and melissa since they were there for the entire week. {whew}
on the other hand, when i showed up for the last day of vbs at abrahms on 28 july philip wasn't quite so kind...</tangent>
we chose to utilize visuals and movement as part of the lesson instead of spending all the time inside sitting on the benches. a no-brainer for trying to maximize the learning experience. the main trick in this would be keeping their attention as we moved outside where there was large potential for more distraction. we also combined classes with monica's class. while this doubled our audience (more difficult for crowd-control), it also gave us monica who could police the group and keep those in back from talking.
we spent most of the trip over from ridge brainstorming for our presentation. what emerged was definitely workable, thanks in no small part to divine influence i'm sure. i wasn't crazy about the whole "sounds great, let's skip the practice and go straight to the performance" part, but we didn't have a whole lot of choice. of one thing i'm very sure, i prayed a LOT harder than i would have if i'd had two or three practice runs under my belt.
philip kept trying to talk me into doing most of the talking. i was having none of it, but it made me realize something that i hadn't thought about before. when philip and i were sitting in monica's car trying to flesh out the outline i was having no trouble expressing a logical thought process in a way that he could understand. thus he felt that i should simply tell the kids what i was explaining to him. the problem was, that only those of us in the car could understand it. it was in a language that none of those (mostly) english speaking kids at abrahms could have understood. i was speaking in sentence fragments, expressing only enough of the idea to communicate it those listening before jumping to the next fragment. because they already knew the details regarding the death and resurrection of the Christ, they were able to quickly fill in the details. speaking off the top of my head to thirty kids from fifth and six forms in whole sentences replete with segues and analogies for practical application would have been (and still is) completely beyond my ability (which just begs us to quote Mark 13.11)
regardless of my thoughts on this in the next thirty minutes, we wound up at the part of the story regarding His resurrection, and mine was the task of explaining what this means for us as God's children. once i got warmed up, i felt like i did alright at expressing at least the idea. and i remember the kids (for the most part) watching me seriously enough. but the whole time i felt like i was going right over their heads...that my message would have been much better received by people of my age group in the states. needless to say i was quite relieved to hand it back over to philip who delivered the "it's your choice, no middle road available courtesy of Rev 3.16" punchline.
then, horror of horrors, he split us up into discussion groups. let's just say that mine didn't go so well (besides the fact that half my group disappeared in the first thirty seconds). it went a lot better after break; because during break philip, monica, and i cooked up a list of discussion questions. i felt a little bit more confident then, but never did get any "discussion" out of my group. they were more than happy (relatively) to answer my "discussion" questions with monosyllabic answers, but my dream free-flowing (on-topic) conversation with me acting as a mere prompter was a (very) distant dream.
as a result (monosyllabic vs run-on sentences) i reached the bottom of our twelve question list in rather short order. i took my time too, trying to fish for more rounded out answers or asking several different kids the same question from various angles. i was paid more attention to than during our first five minute discussion before break, but eventually wound up discussionless. here i think a little practice would have helped, and i would have really liked to sit in on philip's discussion group (which, incidentally, went over their time limit). but then we had a relaxing time of sitting on the grass bank and making small talk. not that i'm any good at that either.
now that i've talked up the morning a good bit, afternoon came on quite quickly. after the second session the entire school assembled for a few performances by various forms and a "what we learned" session where students stood up and announced one thing they learned during the week. most were awarded with a Bible. the session went on for some time as Pastor Clewiston's wife had quite a few Bibles to hand out. there was ice cream and cleanup afterwards. shirley came over to philip and i and talked about the perfect timing we'd had. she'd just finished talking to her class (second form?) about Jesus' death and burial when philip and two volunteers appeared around the corner of the church building hauling my "corpse" to the graveyard below the church (where they laid me on one of the tombs). shirley said she was just finishing her point when as one body the class turned their heads ninety degrees away from their normally attentive posture. not to be out-done, she looked herself—just in time for a "uh...yeah, just like that" comment. she then had to wait patiently for us to finish with the resurrection scene before she could even hope to regain the attention of her class.
eventually philip headed off to join a local futbol game while monica, krista, and i headed back to ridge. we weren't there long before they joined robert and lois in a trip to junction. i stayed behind to clean up the woodshop. foolishly i didn't appropriate a dust mask before beginning, but got away with just a runny nose and the loss of two years lung-life. robert had been in a rush to finish everything up before it came time to depart, so there was quite an accumulation of sawdust...some five large garbage bags of shavings to be carted off by peter's son for their chickens.
after their return from the supply run to junction the evening also progressed rapidly. monica and lois busied themselves with packing their respective sides of the house. having not seen robert in a while i finally tracked him down in the spare bedroom, putting a final coat of varnish on a cabinet. i couldn't get over the comparison, Mom would have thrown a fit if Dad every tried to do something like that in the house. i spent an in-ordinate amount of time making sandwiches for the next day's lunch. there's a lot to be said for a) everybody making their own, or b) buying fast food. however, i was more than happy to do it because; a) it gave me something to do, and b) it meant i could snitch as much of the sandwich meat (jerked pork) as i wanted. oh yes, i may appear to have altruistic intentions but the truth is far from it ;). plus my station in the common room was between monica's bedroom and robert and lois' bedroom so i could tease either monica or lois at will (krista had gone down to spend the night at a. ann's). teasing, i must confess, is something i did a lot of that night (and rather well i might add).
despite the flurry of activity, five hours of sleep was starting to tell by the time 2300 rolled around. so i decided to lay down for a bit (maybe seven hours or so). don't remember much after that...
thus ends Friday
the whole kit and kaboodle – shirley with her class
19:29 email me permalink / commentary (3)
Glad to hear your stretching...I know happen to know a youth group in SLC that would pull you like taffy : ) Come for a visit and try...it would be like spending some time just outside the envelope. 06 August, 2006 20:16 – 
Jenn Heatwole
i feel similarly about kids. i love watching them!...but would rather not get much closer than that. 07 August, 2006 00:50 – zippy
I had one handed to me over the weekend...didn't have a whole lot of choice but to hold him while he sucked his thumb and looked around. I was so thankful he didn't start bawling. 08 August, 2006 06:12 – Brendan
