When the youngsters arrived, they immediately started rolling-out cookie mix and cutting heart-shapes followed by decorations of tiny sugar hearts and rainbow sprinkles on top before Linda expertly baked them in the oven.
We then moved to the front and shared news with each other.
We recapped what we had be covering in our recent sessions, up to Pentecost and then said we were travelling back in time from then to a time where Jesus was preaching and using stories or parables as illustrations to help people understand how God wanted them to live their lives.
The story today was the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Everyone listened as we went through the story and explained the significance of the Samaritan (a despised foreigner to the average Jew), being the hero of the story and the only “true neighbour” to the poor traveller who was attacked by bandits.
The expert in the law, who asked the question of Jesus “Who is my neighbour?” was probably shocked and quite dismayed by the parable which painted the religious leaders as bad and the hated Samaritan as good but, as usual with Jesus, there was no way for anyone to come to any other conclusion.
Jesus said the most important commandment is to love God and love our neighbours as we do ourselves.
We watched a section from the Miracle Maker which portrayed the story, you can see it online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXtiGLhoEI
We played a song “Love God, Love People” sung by Danny Gokey which you can see at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ8D2Mx7tGg the song says that God’s instruction is simple but, the truth is, none of us manage to love the way God wants us to love.
We then came to prayer time where we each wrote names of people who needed prayer or we found difficult to love, onto sticking plasters and stuck them onto a big red heart. And prayed as we heard Duggy Dug sing “May the God of Love” which you can hear and see at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXZYzXNJnEY
We then ate a couple of the heart cookies we had made with the rest going home in bags for friends and family who we wanted to show love to.
Next we had a team game where one person from each team had to be wrapped with toilet paper (like a mummy)
To finish, we had a relay game where each team had to race back and forward in the hall with 2 people, a stretcher and a different cuddly toy on the stretcher. If they dropped the toy they had to go back and the first team to get all the toys safely from one end to the other, was the winner.