Last Sunday, the Bible storyteller for the 2- to 6-year-olds’ group (and their parents) forgot to come. It was a special service with lots of visiting children and parents who would stay with their children. Three minutes before the service I was asked to tell the Bible story.
Light-bulb experience 1
A reminder that before I share a Bible story with anyone else, it’s important to read and reflect on the story myself and then think carefully how to tell it effectively! But in a crisis, depend on God and do my best!
The story was the parable that immediately follows Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11. (The children’s groups have been exploring this prayer the last two Sundays.) It’s the parable about the man who wakes up his friend down the road in the middle of the night demanding three loaves of bread to feed unexpected visitors. The friend eventually gets up, not for love of his demanding friend, but to shut him up. I do not really understand this parable.
‘Preparing’ during the first hymn and prayers I realised there are three sets of friends. I had never noticed this before: the unexpected friends, the desperate host and the friend who’s gone early to bed, along with his children. With more time, I would only have introduced the latter two sets of friends but hey, I didn’t think about this until I was halfway through the story. Three sets of friends make it all too complicated.
Anyway, I discovered which children had gone early and late to bed the night before and which adults owned up to being late to bed! There was lots of snoring, banging on doors and trying to wake people up. We got to the end. The three loaves of bread were taken down the road to feed the unexpected middle-of-the-night visitors with toast and jam!
But here’s the bit I don’t understand. Jesus implies that God wants us to keep on praying and nagging him until he answers, simply to shut us up!
I moved us on to the next PowerPoint slide. We were about to say the Lord’s Prayer. The words ‘Give us today our daily bread’ and ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us’ swam before my eyes! These are the verses just before this parable. They remind us to keep on asking God, again and again, continuing to talk with him every day about the basic things that matter – recognising God’s holiness, our dependency upon him for our daily practical needs, our need for forgiveness, our need for deliverance from evil.
Light-bulb experience 2
In that split second, I understood the significance of placing this parable after the Lord’s Prayer. The story even carries on the theme of requesting bread that is so central to the prayer. God wants us to never stop talking with him and trusting him, daytime and night-time. He will answer. This is not nagging. The Contemporary English Version says that the early-to-bed friend will rise to help his friend ‘simply because you are not ashamed to keep on asking’.
I am grateful that it was in the act of sharing this aspect of God’s character with children and adults, that God’s Spirit gave me more understanding! May this be the experience of us all as children’s workers, so that our own faith will deepen as we engage in our regular children’s ministry!
Ro Willoughby works with people of all ages at St Michael’s Highgate.