Escaping for the dayMartyn Payne |
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We
were fortunate with the weather for this day's holiday club. During a very wet
half-term week so far, we had a day when the sun shone - well, at least until
later on - but most importantly, it shone for the lunch break. Trinity Church
at High Hurstwood in East Sussex had invited me to lead a children's day for
the second year running at their local village hall, and this time we ran with
the theme 'The Great Escape'. Using the pattern for such events that is
outlined in Footsteps to the Feast, we explored
three great escape stories from the Bible with a mixture of games, dramatic re-enactments
(!) and storytelling. We
had 24 children in total, a majority of them boys, and together we looked at
Peter's escape from prison in Jerusalem, then Paul's escape from the shipwreck
off Malta and finally we wondered about what is the greatest but most
mysterious escape of all at Easter, when Jesus decided deliberately not to escape as the only way that true
freedom could be won for us all. I included some reflective storytelling in
each session, using for example Peter's story,
which is a new idea on our website. These
events are the inspiration of the RevD David Tidswell and his wife Margaret,
with whom I have now worked on four occasions for Barnabas, and, together with a small local team, the aim was to
open up a way to reach out to more children and families in this very rural
community. Parents and carers joined us for the last part of the day and this
was an opportunity to share with them what we had been learning together and
for them to admire the amazing cardboard creations of a boat, a prison cell and
an empty tomb in the rock that their children had produced. During
the day we played escape games; we acted out and heard escape stories; we had
even escaped the rain. If only the theme had continued... and I had managed to
escape the very heavy traffic on the way home afterwards! |
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