The third Sunday of Advent already!  Wow, this season is just flying by!! We began our morning reflecting again on how Advent is a time of waiting and preparation for Christmas and the birth of Jesus. We read the book, Who is Coming to Our House? It is a story of animals in a barn wondering who is coming to visit while they clean up the barn, preparing for their “mystery guest”. We also read a short story, An Angel Visits Joseph and wondered: what does an angel look like? How did Joseph feel when he heard the angel’s message about Mary having a special baby?  What if an angel spoke to us in a dream?  Did Joseph hold baby Jesus? We also watched a short video depicting Joseph’s special dream.

As we have done each week of Advent, a variety of books about waiting and preparing for Jesus’ birth were available for children to read and browse at leisure, and there was also a Nativity set for the kids to explore. We made a bed for Joseph under a table, and some of the children took turns dressing up and acting out the story of the Angel visiting Joseph in a dream.  Many of the children created their own Nativity scenes with Nativity cookie cutters and play dough. They decorated them with ribbons, sequins and gems.  In preparation for our Epiphany celebration on January 1st, we strung beads to create garlands to be hung in North Hall.  It was a busy morning!  

Just one more Sunday in our wait and preparation for Christmas!  In peace, Lisa Frisby

On the evening of Saturday, December 3rd, a large group of children and parents gathered together to celebrate the beginning of Advent with stories, crafts, and our beautiful spiral of light in North Hall.  We began our evening in the parlor and were treated to a wonderful drama performed by several of our children about the real Saint Nicholas before we headed downstairs to the darkened and quiet North Hall to wait for our turn in the spiral.  Year after year I never tire of the serenity and beauty of our Advent Spiral, where one by one, each child and adult gets his or her own turn to walk slowly to the center of the spiral, light a candle, and carefully place it around the evergreen pathway.  The quiet anticipation, the conscious slowing of our bodies, and the gentle glowing and growing light of the candles create a mesmerizing and meditative space for everyone.  Such a beautiful start to this season of waiting!  A variety of St. Nicholas-inspired crafts, delicious snacks, and a quiet room for reading Christmas books rounded out our evening together.  Please enjoy the many pictures!

The Multiage and Middler classes were combined last Sunday, so I had a healthy crew of 15 kids with me on the first Sunday of Advent!  Thanks so much to Tim Haggerty and Sean Perham who helped out with our large group.  We began this new season by learning a new song, Wait for the Lord, which is so pretty and so simple.  Click here to listen to the version of the song we sang!  As we sang the song over and over, we lit candles around the circle until the room was filled with light.  So cool to have so many children on this day!  We then used tiles and stones to count out all the days and Sundays until Christmas (4 Sundays, 28 days!) and talked about what we do while we wait for Christmas to arrive (decorate, make cookies, get a Christmas tree, buy presents, go to church).  Then we told the story from the first chapter of Matthew when an angel visited a sleeping Joseph to give him the news that his fiancée Mary was pregnant with the son of God.  We wondered what kind of man Joseph must have been, based on the verses that we read: trustworthy, kind, a true believer, and brave were some of the children’s thoughts.  Our activities included creating our own angel ornaments, making holiday cards for the Concord Prison Outreach ministry, and playing with a variety of nativity sets on our Christmas-lit stage.  Blessings to you during this first week of Advent! 

On Sunday we celebrated West Concord Union Church’s 125th birthday with a lively discussion about the upcoming renovation project, fantastic activities, a surprise parade through the sanctuary at the end of worship, and of course, CAKE!  I vote we have a birthday celebration for the church every single year!  What fun.  Check out the pictures from our Multiage class as we did the following:

Created 125 stamps on paper
Strung 125 colored pasta on string
Made a pathway with 125 tiles
Built structures with 125 Brain Flakes
Decorated the numbers 1, 2, and 5 for our parade

I’m pretty sure the kids will remember how old the church is now!  🙂  

Sunday was a pretty serious day in the Middler classroom. Not only were we focusing on a very sad story but we had an unusually large number of people we needed to pray for this week. It was a gift to be able to lift up our classmates’ mother recovering from surgery, Dennis Lin from Sunday Fellowship, people still recovering from Hurricane Matthew as well as the Grigorieff family following the sudden death of Norah’s son, Jacob. As we placed out written prayers into a bowl in the middle of our table, we talked about how we were symbolically placing all of these people in God’s loving care. Even if we couldn’t fix any of the situations, I think we all felt lighter for having invited God to be with them and to help us carry our concerns.

I wrote last week that the Middlers have spent the fall learning about the ups and downs of ancient Israel as well as the good and bad choices made by its leaders along the way. This Sunday we told the story of one of Israel’s lowest points, the Fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity. We heard how Zedekiah, Judah’s last king, tried to flee the city, abandoning his people before the arrival of the huge Babylonian army. After two years of starvation and siege, the Babylonians finally broke down the city wall, burned all the homes, looted the Temple built by King Solomon and marched thousands of Jerusalem’s most skilled residents all the way to Babylon.

We took a break from heavy stuff for a few minutes to do some more work on our wood round project for the church auction. It felt really good to use our hands paint wood conditioner on the wood to bring out its beautiful grain patterns.

Afterwards, we came back together for discussion about places in the world where people are currently being forced to leave their homes and become refugees. Countries like Syria and Iraq were named. To get a better idea of how difficult it is to be a refugee, we walked slowly around the room while listening to One Green Apple, a story written from the perspective of a young Muslim girl newly arrived in the United States.  After the story, we took a few moments to pray while listening to some calming music. I hope we could feel that while leaders may disappoint us in difficult times, God stays in good times and in bad. Special thanks to parent helper Kathleen Reidy.

Beginning our time together with the Middler class was such a treat on Sunday, as we learned the beautiful song What Does the Lord Require of You? and even sang it as a three-part round (sort of)!  From the words of Micah, we sang of justice, kindness, and humbleness in the eyes of God.  Our story on Sunday focused on the tragic and violent fall of Jerusalem when Babylon destroyed the city and the temple, and the people had to flee for their lives.  Imagine what that might have felt like!  We thought about having to leave our homes at a moment’s notice and what we would bring with us (favorite blanket, pillow, stuffed animals, and a Pokémon Go phone – the essentials).  After our story, we sat down together for a snack and noticed there wasn’t enough food for everyone!  The children QUICKLY pointed out that leaving someone out would be terribly unfair, so they worked together to split the snack so everyone got a fair share.  Justice and kindness in action!  As we ate, we read a beautiful story called One Green Apple by Eve Bunting about a young Muslim refugee who is struggling in the US and misses home, but begins to find friendship in an apple orchard.  We also watched the first 1:55 of the video To Be A Refugee and talked about how brave all these children are.  We lit candles in our darkened room and prayed for peace and healing among all people and nations.