The Stories of Scripture: Adding to the Experience

I've posted about this before.

As you read the stories of scripture and passages to remember consider that people were day-to-day familiar with the natural images and analogies you find. It added to their understanding of the story - a teaching and learning tool in God's hand.

If you aren't already familiar with those natural images find a way! Look ahead at the stories you'll cover this season. Make a list. What pre-story scouting can you do to add to the sensory experience for your kids and ultimately to their understanding of who God is.

Maybe your kids are more familiar day-to-day with some of the images than you are. Give them opportunities to share.

Ask your kids: "What do you know about lilies in a field?" A sparrow? Sheep?

Grape vines

Rain on a farmers field

Waves on great lakes

a desert

dry seasons

floods

We know God by all the names He gives us in the scriptures but, especially as children, we learn to know God as Creator.

We don't even have to over-explain and understand all the ins and outs. Sometimes it's enough to just stand in awe of Him and all that His hands have done. Sometimes it's enough to just say "Wow!"

grapevine! (Some of you have asked for more photos!)

Looks like I need to go back and take pictures!!

Grape Vines

We took my youngest daughter out to eat for her 24th birthday in the middle of Finger Lakes wine country.

Thought about you guys as I stared out the window at a field of grape vines. Sorry. Forgot my camera. The trunks were noticeably old and thick. The leaves small, tender, new.  These are fairly young wineries.

The vinier had surely cut out all the dead wood that didn't bear any fruit and pruned back the branches that did. Someone who went to college in wine country on Lake Erie once told us how the smell of the grapes in the fields before harvest hung heavy in the air.

They'll be picking lots of ripe grapes in the fall and crushing the grapes and letting the juice mellow and age ...

Made me think of old traditions and new ideas, old folks and children, good fruit, bad fruit, crushed fruit and dead wood...

Went back and read John 15 .

If you're driving through wine country use the opportunity to ponder God's thoughts about vines and grapes and vineyards and wine...new wine...aged wine... Take a tour. Go back and read John 15.

Behind the restaurant was an abandoned field of grapevines, unpruned, unkept, obscured by all the other plant life left to take over the field...The vines are still there. They just won't bear the quality or quantity of fruit that the other field will.

Lots to ponder...