ice lollies and storage bags

It has been gloriously sunny today, so I took my Sunday children to sit on the grass, where we ate ice lollies and had a story. It was the one about Jesus being in a foreign country when a local woman asks him to heal her daughter. His first response is to say he's only been sent to his own people, but she gives him a clever answer and her daughter is healed. He was exhausted and on holiday at this point, so no wonder he was a bit phased at first by the request.

We talked about what it's like to be excluded, and whether there are any people we exclude. Somehing we agreed on was that people with speech defects often don't have many friends, because it's hard to understand what they're saying. We decided that there's always room for a few more in God's kingdom. So having talked our way round all this and challenged each other to talk this week to somebody we wouldn't normally talk to, we played a game of 'how many cpeople can we get into a storage bag?' (Don't panic, we only put our feet in.)

At the end of the service, the children are always invited to the front to talk about what we've been doing. We explained, we demonstrated the storage bag game (yes, we did take our shoes off), and challenged them to talk to somebody new this week.

There's always a bit more room. There's a delightful poem about that called 'Mrs Malone', and I think it's by Elinor Farjeon, but I'd have to look it up.

Meeting new people can be challenging. But life gets boring if we don't.

PS Slappable characters -

I wouldn't slap Uncle Pumblechook in Great Expectations, I'd push him down the stairs.

Amelia in Vanity Fair. What a wet haddock.