Relapse

I woke up early Tuesday morning w/ an intense, throbbing headache. The staff members thought that I probably had malaria, despite my earlier negative test b/c sometimes if you’re already on malaria-prevention medication it can cause a false negative (and thus told me that I may have gotten my money’s worth out of socialized medicine – happy, A?). So I started on a malaria treatment regimen and spent the entirety of Tuesday in bed. Later that day, after having sweated through another set of sheets, shirt, and shorts, I seemed to have gotten over my illness. For the past week or so, it seems the success of the day has been determined by a very simple rubric: whether I spent more time that day in bed or out of it. It seems to be a cycle of get sick, not be able to eat, get over sickness, be weak due to lack of eating, repeat. Basically, the moral of the story is that for the last week or so I've been about as useless as tits on a boar hog.

I have been thinking about what to do for Bible study w/ the kids. Last week I had a short amount of time to put together anything, so I took one of my favorite sermons of Louie Giglio’s and adapted it into more of a Bible study. By the end of our time, the few left awake had a very glazed look in their eyes. Mind you, this was from a sermon that I had listened to literally dozens of times and loved. I wasn’t quite sure why I wasn’t getting through. A few nights later during study time, one of the older kids, who seems to be one of the smarter kids, asked me to explain something to him that he was reading. He wasn’t sure what it meant. The sentence said something along the lines of, “Jacob loved his son Joseph very much.” Oh. So maybe I overestimated the level of English comprehension among the group. I was to them like some pre-Vatican II priest babbling incoherently some foreign language. I needed to find a better way to connect.

I thought about using something that Christians have used for hundreds of years to teach foundational beliefs when they were resource-strapped: creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. Now this may seem like an obvious solution to many Christians, but it is not a means of first resort for someone raised in the Restoration Movement, which holds as a central tenet, “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, no name but the Divine.” However, after doing some initial research, I felt that the creeds did not get into the types of issues that I wanted to tackle in the Bible studies, and I also began to see why our movement’s founders decried their use. They are as divisive and their variations about as numerous as denominations themselves are.

So I stumbled upon another medium that Christians have used for centuries to teach believers w/o the luxury of books and study guides. No, not stained glass. Glass is in short supply here, and I’m not artistic enough to paint it. The other night I was in bed, getting ready to go to sleep and listening to my iPod. I happened to be listening to the song “Days of Elijah” when it hit me: I should teach the kids some new songs that are rich in scriptural references, and then we could spend some time reading the texts from which the words are taken. I thought, “I wonder if there’s a good song that talks about grace that I could use to really drive home the gospel of grace in the Bible. I’ll see if Chris Tomlin has anything along those lines. Oh, yeah. ‘Amazing Grace.’ Probably the most famous song in all of Christendom. Yeah, I think that should work okay.” The songs that I am planning to use for right now are “Days of Elijah,” “Amazing Grace,” “I Stand Amazed,” “Come Thou Fount,” and “In Christ Alone.” I thought that we could turn the verse lookups into competitions of who could find the scriptures first. To ensure the kids’ participation, I could give out alawa (candy) to the winners. I am not above bribery.