a beautiful nightmare

i guess the vacation got to my head or something.   we're a few weeks past new year's and a whole new round of birthdays is starting, both of which tend to make us think of newness, happiness, beginnings, life and all manner of fun and frivolity.

we had spend a month learning about Noah and that section's theme of God keeping His promises.  it was fantastic, and we all had a blast.  if the kids spent any time at all thinking about the hundreds or thousands of people who were washed away by the rising waters, that all stopped the second i mentioned a 600-year-old guy building a boat, or doing anything, really. that alone is fairly distracting; when you add the chaotic zoological menagerie Noah and his family catered to for that entire year, i should be grateful they even retained "God Keeps His Promises."  we galloped like horses, stomped like elephants, roared like lions and tigers and bears, oh my- we did it all.  we sang "Arky, Arky" (which every child needs to know.  is this a "Northerner" thing?!?  only 2 adults i polled from church knew the song).  we had so much fun wondering if Noah had freshwater fishbowls on the ark, that we didn't really bring up the homes and pets and people and wildlife that didn't make it.

i was still a thinking a week behind when i waltzed into church this afternoon to prepare some coloring pages for all 17,000 children, flipped open the manual and saw the story for this week.

oh goodie.

instead of sticking with Abraham, we were jumping ahead a few centuries, right into Egypt, a land filled with slaves and sin, and about to be filled with frogs, bugs, brimstone and death.

i chose different coloring pages- happy pages- to photocopy.

i got all the story picture cards in order.

i wondered for 90 minutes how on earth to tell the story without causing too much trauma. this story didn't have any 600 year old people OR giant boats. 

we were doing mostly alright for almost half the time. 

entire river turning into blood? eww, but we moved on.

frogs? icky, but not too bad.

bugs? eh, not a problem.

boils? gross, but 4 year olds can't quite fathom it, so it passed right over their heads.

then all the fluffy cute animals died. bam. the Egyptians had lost their water supply, now they'd lost their meat, too. the kids didn't get that, either.  so i told them the truth: every time you eat a burger, someone lost a cow for that deliciousness.  no more burgers for the Egyptians.

thunder and hailstorms. locusts. darkness. three days of a darkness so dark you could feel it.

each time, Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and asked him to let God's people go.  
each time, Pharaoh said, "No."

every. blasted. time.

the kids had sobered enough by this point to hear the whole deal with Plague #10. 

about the fluffy white sheepie. about killing it.  about painting the door frame with its blood.  i am SO GLAD we no longer live in a culture where this wouldn't have sounded altogether creepy and gross and sad. 

but it is.  it's creepy AND gross AND sad.

it's to save the firstborns.

God was going to save the firstborn Israelites (all of them, really).  the firstborn Egyptians weren't so lucky.

the kids didn't really understand the word "firstborn."  so i told them the truth.  the oldest boy in every family.

bam.

there were a few firstborn sons in the classroom. at least half the class had older brothers.  there were tears- legit, wet, crocodile tears- welling up in those eyes.  one child covered his face with his hands and fell forward to hide his reaction to the idea of his older brother dying.

i couldn't help feeling it, too.  i've got a brother.  my sister has a firstborn kid that i saw last week and played in the snow with and worked puzzles with.

we ended the night with awards and badges for all the verses they've said, so i think they recovered. possibly better than i did.

…

this year instead of returning with my friends to India, i have remained here.  but my thoughts and prayers are still with them now, and i remembered one of the experienced from last year that got my attention.

it was a sunday morning after a 12-hour drive through bouncy, bumpy unpaved "roads" in a car with fewer seats than people.  the end of the trek landed us in a hotel with fewer beds than people, no hot water but lots of cold water on the floor and walls and pipes and…

anyway, we woke up and sipped the chai tea the hotel guy brought from the seller across the street, so we were looking down on him from the second story window as he conversed with a large crowd of folks, probably all about the white people that came to town.  then Lynn and i looked a little past him to the empty lot.  oh boy.  i was not quite awake enough for that. this is a small excerpt from what i wrote about it later.

***

the first morning in the hotel in Ongol i woke up to a surprise.  apparently on weekends, Indians like to chill before another work week and do most of their hanging out on Sundays, and their hanging out usually involves eating more meat than weekdays. some things are the same over there. :)

well, this hotel was one street behind a main street, so our windows overlooked the back of the market stalls that sell meat, especially lamb and chicken.

i would just like to state that i didn’t immediately appreciate the eye-opening insight to the Passover celebration, especially that early on a morning…but i did several cups of chai tea later.

it’s not clean.  it certainly isn’t pretty. it is not a part of our sanitized culture.  i wonder if we lost some of the beautiful hugeness of his sacrifice because we got rid of some of the ugliness.

the idea of hosting a cute little lamb in your house for a week and then turning it into lamb chops is one thing, especially after the kids have named it, petted it, played with it.

the idea that God Incarnate would willingly become that lamb and live among us, seeing the cross in His future for 33 years takes “sacrifice” to a whole new level.

***

i did not particularly enjoy making small people cry.

but the fact remains that without the sheep's sacrifice, Israel was doomed to slavery.

and without Jesus' sacrifice so are we.

it's a terrible bedtime story. 

but the good-ness is so good only because the bad-ness is so, so bad.

the best-est, most beautiful nightmare.

when the children get over the buggy nightmare, my hope is that maybe they'll hold on to just enough of the terror of the plagues to make the coming salvation that much sweeter.

my other hope is that big people do, too.  i know that all too often i forget some things.  it's easy to remember that i'm saved.  it's not always easy to remember what i've been saved from. i take the salvation almost for granted and neglect the cost that i didn't have to pay. it's happier, but it cheapens the happiness.  it's prettier, but it's not the truth. the truth is that all of humanity was on the edge of a thousand-foot cliff, about to fall into a rocky barren firepit. then we were hauled back at the last instant by our only hope. take away the cliff and firepit and all you've got left is a walk in the park that Jesus gives up an afternoon to join you for.

without the plagues, the Israelites would've given up even earlier or not even left their taskmasters. they would have made all the bricks Pharaoh wanted, as long as they got their cucumbers (seriously, where were their priorities?!?!).

we closed out story time, transitioned to snack time and after the Nilla Wafers we sang another classic, "My God is So Big"- and said a prayer of thanks. thanks for being so big, so strong and so mighty that there's nothing our God cannot do.  so big and so strong that he can turn rivers to blood, dirt into bugs, horror into hope and death into deliverance.

sweetest dreams, friends.

(just remember to check for frogs!)