Today I received a wonderful teacher’s surprise! I’m sure anyone who’s been a teacher has experienced this…especially a primary grade teacher. For the past few days, as Taryn and I stand at the whiteboard trying to teach the kids the “Jesus story”, our class of mostly 4-7 year olds draw, colour, throw paper airplanes, fight, and generally have the attention span of one second. We’ve gotten used to being halfway through telling a story and realizing that no one is listening. At the end of the lesson, my throat is sore and I realize that I have been yelling out the last parts of the lesson over all the chatter.
As always, we begin our lessons with Jesus songs, which the kids love (in fact, it’s the only time when all the kids are all paying attention), and five of the little boys enthusiastically volunteer to help lead the actions for the song. Before we start singing, I see two of them turn around and point to the unlabelled diagram I had drawn on the board to discuss later as review in class. One boy chatters in Nepali to the other, and then he points to the lyrics I had written for the song “Lord I Lift Your Name on High”, which talks about what Jesus did for us on the cross. I suddenly realize that through the chaos of our noisy class, he has still understood what we’ve been trying to teach. Praise God! We had been praying for our classes every day in the morning before we taught, and a gush of thankfulness fills me as I discover that God answers our prayers and makes Himself known, even through language and age barriers.
Here is one of our kids, Ram, holding a picture of the Jesus story that we drew in class:
