So we were doing Elijah and the Prophets of Baal. I had this lovely,state-of-the-art presentation (Flannelgraph is long since gone round these parts, I can tell you).
And the kids say to me, so all the Prophets of Baal must have repented and realised that they were wrong, and turned to follow God, yeah? And I had to think about this. It struck me I had three choices:
(I) Lie, say "yes, they all lived happily ever after", and cut the appropriate verses out of every single Bible in the Community.
(II) Lie, say "yes, they all lived happily ever after",and tell them God never wanted them to read the Bible as long as they lived.
(III) Tell the truth, and then deal with a hundred questions I didn't really want to answer.
So I went for option (IV) - told them to ask their teacher, and then ran out of the room claiming the Moot House was due to receive a large delivery of eels. Which, as it happened, was true. And that's an alt.lit event I don't want to revisit, as well. But that's another story.
It strikes me that Elijah was a great hero of faith. But you wouldn't want him to organise the inter-faith barbecue service.
The Bible can be tricky when dealing with children's questions. But the reality is that they love to here the gory bits and relish the details of how characters behaved and how a wrathful God took vengeance on the disobedient flocks.
ReplyDeleteIf you treat it all like a Spaghetti Western, you won't go far wrong.