'What do you see?'

I praise God for His grace and am blessed abundantly in it. As our church finishes Isaiah and moves into Jeremiah, I was unsure what direction to take with the children. God’s help I am grateful for—we began by singing a new song (all the time God is good) and for our ‘missionary minute’ rather than watch a Go360 highlight we reviewed the Joshua Project website and prayed for Russia. We played a name game, and then moved into the lesson on ‘visions’ referencing the first chapter of Jeremiah.

I had a drawn picture of a crane lifting up a box and asked, ‘what do you see?’ The kids described elements of it, to which I explained how God spoke to Jeremiah using word pictures to capture the meaning of what he wanted him to know and speak to other people. The crane lifting up a box, for instance, could mean that God would want us to ‘lift up’ something in prayer, or to help lift a heavy burden. I gave another example, spontaneously, combining two random elements, ‘a girl in a can.’ For a moment I wondered what could be brought together from this image, with the kids offering some suggestions, and then offered that maybe in a grocery store in the tuna fish isle where there are pictures of mermaids there would be a lady who felt stuck with something (last week’s lesson of things that ‘tangle us’) and needed prayer, and that God ‘can’ do it. I described how for Jeremiah, one of the first things we hear God giving him a vision on was an almond branch, and God telling him that he is ‘watching,’ and how the word Almond in Hebrew sounded like the word for ‘watching.’ Davidicus was wearing two watches on both hands, which provided an example how for us if God gave us a vision of Davidicus’ two arms with watches, that God may be ‘watching’ over us ‘double time’ and that his arms are not too short to save.

I referenced how God can speak to us like this even now for the purpose of evangelism, where I shared some stories from my experiences with the ‘treasure hunt’ evangelism method of asking the Holy Spirit for images that He wants to show us in guiding us to a particular person He wants to connect with, and shared the example of when we were led to a certain store, and received a picture of a ‘big (healthy) baby’ and ended up connecting with a woman from church who recently had a healthy baby and was walking through the store.

We then went onto the activity where the children were to draw themselves and something important on a notecard and place it in a bucket to be randomly picked and someone to provide an interpretation of ‘what they see’ and guess who drew it, and the illustrator of the picked card would go next. Some drawings were very clear and easily identifiable (a student with toys or activities the student enjoys) while others provided some room for interpretation, like one of them being two stick figures with a box around one and some numbers, and one student said ‘I see two people, and this could be a movie theatre, and this person could like doing things together with their dad.’ Although not the illustrator’s intent, a very sweet interpretation!

The lesson spanned the length of the adult service and right as we finished the last child’s drawing we finished with prayer. God please help us to seek and understand the visions You give us for Your purposes, in Jesus’ name.