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Sometimes there is a need and you can meet it, so you just do it.

That was the case for us this past weekend.  We were meeting with one of the “Barefoot Leaders” of Malaysia and he mentioned that they were planning a leadership planning retreat and were in need of someone to provide a program for the children of the Planning Team, so we agreed to do it. Friday after work we drove up about a half hour north of the city to the lovely campus of Malaysia Baptist Seminary.

We had fourteen sweet and energetic young people aged between two and thirteen who were out for a good time. The Friday evening session went from 7- 10:30 so we were pretty exhausted by the time we made it to our hard little beds. The kids created a picture of their current world and shared their stories with the group.  We had them add “suns” to show us the happy things in their lives and then “clouds” to represent the difficult things. Even John, our little two year old was able to tell us what each scribble represented.  They totally got into the dramatization of the Joseph story, using the few props that we had taken with us

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Saturday we had the kids from 9- 4:30 straight and were very grateful for a couple of young people from Harvest Center who came to help us out.  Fortunately they all just loved drawing because in the morning we had them dream about they would like their lives to be in the future. Again they could  glue on rainbows for the easy things and clouds for the challenges ahead and again they shared their dreams with the group.  Joseph had his coat and was ready to go for the second part of the story, there is nothing like drams to get kids involved in the story.  In the afternoon the kids had cut-out ladders to join their two pictures and identify the steps they need to take to get to their dream and the challenges they would face along the way.

The biggest battle was the fact that the school has a fabulous swimming pool which the parents had promised they could use when their planning session was done at 3.  Those poor little kids had to be patient until 4:30 when the parents finally came, even as they listened the sounds of the approaching afternoon monsoon.  We don’t really consider ourselves “Children’s Ministry” kind of folks but we had fun, the kids were totally involved and we were able to be a blessing to the New Covenant Community so it was all good.