Time for a Breather

BTSW--check
Tea--check
start of SS--check
restructure SS for more kids--check
3rd grade Bible presentation--check

Now I can rest for a little bit.

Cool thing from this weekend, though. We had 7 kids RSVP for their Bibles, but 30 kids came up to the front. Thank God I had enough Bibles up there. Several of those kids were visitors and had never had a Bible before and didn't know how to use it. In SS, now that we have broken up into smaller groups, the teachers were able to focus on teaching those kids about their Bibles, and I think they are going to come back. One of the things I've found in my ministry at this church and at others is that if you give them Bibles, they will come (to play off a phrase). Seriously though, at our preteen ministry on Wed nights, we give free Bibles to anyone to take home, and those kids come back. It is the coolest thing to see them treasure a Bible and come back for a Bible, not an mp3 player or some other freebie. It's very powerful.

Plus, in the 3rd grade group for SS, we had a teacher mixup, so there wasn't a teacher available. Before the shepherds and I could even scramble to think of what to do, one of the kids said, "Can we do what we did in KidsInC last week since we got our new Bibles?" What we had done was make bookmarks out of 4 different colored ribbons (Learning to Use My Bible--Cokesbury) for them to mark the Table of Contents, the OT, Psalms, and the NT. I was nervous because I ran out of ribbon, but we pulled out a bucket of yarn, and the kids were braiding it together. Kids were teaching the new kids and helping them find the sections. We didn't even miss not having a teacher.

Such a cool weekend! I left that day and on the way to lunch I just screamed out, "I love my job!" It's so cool to see that even if things have "failed" on a physical plane, God knows exactly what He is doing! It gets hard sometimes, especially when everyday someone has to complain or question a decision that I've made, but when I stop and see that the Lord's hand is in every bit of it, even the "mistakes," I can just smile and tell those people that God knows what He's doing. It stops them dead in their tracks and preserves my joy!