I am doing Elijah stories with the kids at church this month. I had forgotten that I really do enjoy teaching kids. It used to be awkward to have Brianna in the same group with the girls who are 3-6 years older than she is, but now it seems to work better. I always start with doing something and they always start by trying to guess what it has to do with the lesson. So Saturday night we were mixing up cookie dough. One of the girls said, "I know--we're going to make cookies shaped like God!" I said, "Wow--I wouldn't even know how to begin--would you?" One of the girls said, "Well, God might just be kind of round." I said, "Wow! Imagine that--you might have been making sugar cookies shaped like God your whole life and just never realized it!"
Anyway, we made sugar cookie crowns because we talked about King Ahab, but then we ate the crowns because he didn't really deserve to be king anyway.Then they made these cool little ravens while I told them about God sending the ravens with food to Elijah. Brianna just kept saying, "At night, too?"with great awe after I read the verses that say that the ravens brought Elijah bread and meat every morning and every evening. I finally understood that when she was explaining the story to Paul later. She said, "I just can't figure out how those birds could see to find Elijah in the dark." I said, "Well, maybe ravens can see in the dark--I don't know." "Or maybe," Brianna says with sparkling eyes full of the delight of the miraculous, "maybe God made a very very bright star to lead them to Elijah." As Kristen, another grown-up in our community, says, "I've always just wondered what kind of meat the ravens were carrying to him and did he actually eat it?" I've always preferred to just picture something like beef jerky. But who knows, we're in the middle of a miracle anyway, so why couldn't it have been cordon bleu? The other great thing the girls did: when I said, "Well, that's where we're going to leave Elijah this week, there by the little stream with the ravens bringing him food. But next week, we're going to find out that even that little stream dries up." And they all 3 did this huge,"OH NO!" kind of reaction. They left making guesses about how God would take care of Elijah then. Kids are cool.