While Brandon and Dan gallivanted off to Kenya for manistry and Brenda, Kyla and Tangi hopped to Zanzibar, Christi, Lindsay and I remained in Morogoro. When we weren’t resting and running personal errands (namely blogging, emailing, and uploading photos & videos), we helped out at the YWAM preschool on base. We taught the little ones fun songs (“the moose song” and “Making Melody” were the crowd favorites), told a Bible story (Daniel and the lions’ den), and fielded some questions.
They asked us several things, including where we are from, what we did before we went on the World Race, and how we got here. The last question was referring to which modes of transportation brought us here to Morogoro. I spotted a world map hanging on the wall and was inspired.
Last summer at my church, the pre-kindergarten Sunday school kids learned about missions. Each week, they heard stories from long and short term missionaries about the places they served – Honduras, Mexico, the Gambia, Malawi, Kyrgyzstan to name a few – and added stickers of the flags of those countries to their (makeshift) passports. Last month in Kampala, Marisa gave a brief message on being citizens of heaven and salvation as our passport.
Why don’t we make some Tanzanian passports for the twenty kids, ages five and six, and draw some little flags they can affix inside them, I wondered. It took ten pieces of green construction paper, a little over ten sheets of plain paper, some markers, staples, scissors and tape to make the passports and flags. Christi colored twenty small Tanzanian flags and we drew and colored (some not so accurately) forty flags of Japan, France, Ireland, the U.S., Canada, Italy, Romania, Honduras, Sweden, China, India, the Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, and South Korea.
We picked flags of countries we ourselves had been to, are going to, and well, honestly, were easy to draw. There was a point when we tried to make flags that didn’t require much of the color blue and red ‘cause the markers were running out of pigment. It took a couple hours and cutting and coloring the small paper rectangles got tedious here and there, but we did it.
We did this “passport” lesson on our last day with the preschool. We each brought our passports so we could show them an example of a real one. I explained as simply as I could its purpose and the information it contains; we showed the stamps and visas (permission to visit a country, I told them) in the pages. As Lindsay assembled the components of our pretend passports, I tried to bring this mini-lesson to a spiritual level.
I explained the one reason why we were traveling to so many places: to share the love of Jesus. His name is our passport and our citizenship is in heaven. This world is not our home, heaven is; we represent God as His ambassadors (well, I said messengers).
When we concluded our lesson, their teacher, Isaac, thanked us for prophesying over them. He explained that obtaining a passport is costly and a hassle so most people don’t bother. But who knows? Among these kids, a new class of missionaries will prepare the way for the Lord in these very countries.
