Our daily kid’s services have been going extremely well and I just wanted to share a little bit of that with you. Without a translator it’s been difficult to come up with an hour of “stuff” that’s going to keep their attention, yet still be able to communicate the important spiritual lessons that we want to teach them. But with God’s help (and hours of quality time with Annie’s little yellow dictionary) I think we’ve been pretty successful. The entire first week we focused on the fact that God loves us and used several different Bible stories to illustrate that. This week we dove a little deeper with subjects like Jesus life, the salvation message, learning how to pray, God’s purpose for your life, and loving others with your words and actions. We are also teaching them the Lord’s Prayer one verse at a time. The kids are getting much more involved now than they did at the beginning, and it’s really neat to see their excitement about everything. I think we’ve finally gained their trust and respect, so it’s much easier to get them to settle down and listen to what we have to say. Almost every day we have them color a picture that goes along with our lesson, but yesterday when we talked about prayer we asked them all to write out their own prayer to God. They are just precious! A few kids even got up in front of everyone and read their prayers out loud…they were so excited about it! We have their pictures and prayers hung up all over the church, and the kids proudly show them off when their parents come for the night services.
We have taught them lots of new songs and games but I think their favorites have become A Tootie Tot (very similar to Singin in the Rain), Pato pato ganzo (duck duck goose) and musical chairs (I’m surprised no one’s been seriously injured from this one yet!). It’s so much fun to just be silly and laugh and play with them. These kids have worked their way into my heart, and I know it’s going to be hard to say goodbye to them all on Thursday. I pray that God continues to work in this village after we leave, and my hope is that the next group who comes here will be able to build off the foundation that has been laid.
