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Do you get frustrated during cold and flu season because you and your grandkids have to miss church so much? Or are you the grandparent who watches them for an hour or two when they're sick so their mom and dad can go to church, then high tail it to second service yourself (that's us 🙂 ). That's fine for you and the parents, but what about the kiddies? How about doing a homeschool-Sunday School for them when you're babysitting for the parents?
If they're extremely sick, they may only be up to a Bible story or, perhaps, a Christian DVD. But if they're feeling OK other than being contagious, you can have a really great time together. My grandkids and I just did that this morning. I took over a couple of favorite childrens books of Bible stories that we all love, including the Pray & Play Bible. We read about Jonah and talked about the different lessons we can learn from his life, like:
- God is present everywhere so there's nowhere we can hide from Him. Psalm 139, including 8-12 – "If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to You; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to You."(NIV)
- God wants everyone to be saved and that should be one of our desires as well. – "The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." 2 Peter 3:9
- Jonah had to choose to obey or disobey God. We have the same choices daily, and we should always choose to obey God. Every time we disobey God we are following Jonah's bad example.
- Every time we cheerfully obey we are following Jonah's good example. In fact, every day when we wake up, we can tell God "Thank You for this day. Please use me today and help me to make the right choices."
After we finished the story, we sang a couple of songs from the book then had a great time making BIG FISH puppets from envelopes, following the book's suggestion to cut one strip off the skinny left side of the envelope and a triangle out of the middle of the skinny right side. They put their hands in the big opening and "swam" the fish around. They had so much fun decorating these and I had so much fun watching them.
They all did a great job and we had such a delightful time. As they worked on the fish, I praised God for yet another fun opportunity to do a bit of "soul-fishing and soul-training" of my own with my sweet grandchildren.