In the Wilderness

 

Hi everyone and Happy Valentines Day! We hope you have a good day spent with people you love. Thank you to everyone who sent in Valentines cards for the residents of our local care homes. We love sharing God's love with people in our town.

We've already been on quite a journey with Moses. Our video today starts with a recap of the amazing things we've already heard about. 

Moses has led the Israelites out of Egypt and now they are following God through the desert but their tummies start rumbling and so they start grumbling.

Let's watch the video and see how God helped them.

God is amazing! The Israelites were in the desert with no food and they complained to Moses. Moses went to speak to God about it and God heard their prayers. 

God sent something called "manna" each morning. It was described as "bread from heaven" and it was said to taste like honey. That sounds like a great breakfast to me. I love honey on my toast. Manna was also described as "thin flakes" so maybe it was a bit like Frosties!

In the evenings, God sent quail to the camp (these are small birds) so that the Israelites would have meat to eat too.

God gave them rules about collecting the food. They were told to only collect enough for that day, apart from on the sixth day when they were to collect enough for two days. If they collected too much food, it would turn mouldy the next day. 

God was helping the Israelites but they needed to trust Him. It also shows us how important God thinks it is to rest one day a week. This rest day is called a Sabbath. Jews have their rest day on a Friday evening until Saturday evening and most Christians have their rest day on a Sunday. 

When we look at the stories in the Bible, we aren't just finding out about things that have happened it the past. We are learning about what God is like and what that means for us today. 

In this story we can see that God cares for us. He listens to our prayers and he cares if we are feeling hungry or thirsty or tired. 

It says in the Bible...

Do not worry about anything. But pray and ask God for everything you need. And when you pray, always give thanks.

Philippians 4:6

(You may have noticed another part of the story in the video. We'll come back and look at the 10 commandments in a couple of weeks).

Our Activity Book

If you are new to the Christchurch Kids blog and would like an activity book, please email Emy at childrenandfamilies@christchurch-clevedon.org.uk

We can have a look in our activity books now and find the pages about living in the wilderness.

Prayer

These prayers are based on prayers from the Flame Creative blog

Today, we have been hearing about manna or bread from heaven so we're going to use bread in our prayers. You will need a small piece of bread for these prayers (or you can imagine a piece of bread as you talk to God).

Tear off a piece of the bread. 

We can pray for those who are living in places torn apart by war. We can pray for those people whose families are having to live apart.

We can ask God for peace and healing in these places.

Hold your bread in your hand.

We can pray for people who are feeling lonely. We can ask that they will know God is with them and that they are not alone.

Eat a piece of your bread.

We can thank God that we have enough to eat. We can ask God to help those who are hungry. We can pray for people who are running the food bank and Make Lunch who are helping people to have enough to eat. 

Amen

We've got a great song to sing together today. It's got fun actions and bit of dancing too.

We sang it last week at F@CT Online as we talked about how generous God is and it's a great one to sing today as we praise God that He loves us and gives us all that we need.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope you have a great half term.

Have you heard about our Easter play? 

We had so much fun putting together our online Nativity play that we are putting something together for Easter Day. A bit of acting or narrating could be a great activity for half term!

If you would like to get involved, please email Emy at childrenandfamilies@christchurch-clevedon.org.uk