It Was A Stretch... Yesterday I had the opportunity to teach children at church. I’m not always given this opportunity, which may be because I do stuff like the story I’m about to tell…

When I arrived, the students were creating Christmas cards to deliver to a local nursing home in the afternoon. The plan, if I understand it, was to: visit, sing, pass out the handmade greeting cards, and be generally cheerful. The kids understood why they were making cards and for whom. They genuinely wanted to do a good job. In my view, time they were spending making these cards was worship.

I was assigned to 4th thru 6th graders, as they are a little bit less impressionable than the younger ones. Another teacher (name withheld to protect the innocent) had a lesson for the 1st thru 3rd graders. This teacher and I were reluctant to split the children into study groups, because we didn’t want to break up the card making/crafting. It was worship. We waited, trying to give them adequate time to make enough cards so that every resident at the nursing home would get one. It seemed a worthy endeavor.

The lesson for the older group was about gender differences and respecting others – especially those creepy boys! Or yucky girls! It was a good topic; and the scripture was a gem! A doozy! It was that passage in Colossians that says we should clothe ourselves with compassion - and kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. We should ‘bear with’ one another, and forgive each other! And LOVE, holds all these virtues together. Wow!

The lesson for the younger group involved reading the Luke 2 account of the savior’s birth and singing carols. After making a ton of Christmas cards, we were short on time. The birth account seemed like a good fit, so kept both groups together. We sat them all down and read and talked about the birth of the Christ child. We asked them to think about how He was different than other babies. We discussed what it meant to be a ‘Savior’.

Then we moved on to singing carols. They called out the names of songs they wanted to sing. The first choice, by far, was ‘Jingle Bells.’ It was not what we had in mind, but we’re boring adults. Next, they wanted ‘Rudolph’. We acquiesced, thinking they’d soon run out of secular songs and hit one about Jesus.

As we sang the story of the abused, fictional reindeer, it occurred to me that the characters in the song could use a dose of Colossians 3 – compassion, gentleness, kindness, humility… Those jerks wouldn’t even let him play in all the reindeer games!!!

So I went for it. We read and discussed the passage in light of the Rudolph song. We talked about what it means to ‘bear with’ others when they’re getting on our nerves. Even siblings aren’t exempt!! We acknowledged that we could not be gentle, compassionate, kind, humble, or loving without Jesus’ help. So we settled that the best way to share Christmas with our community is to demonstrate those virtues (for the record, none of them could define ‘virtue’ initially). We would make it our purpose to be just like Rudolph – I mean Jesus…. well, unlike Rudolph’s friends anyway.

OK, it was a stretch…  ¶ 12:00 PM