Class - Day #2 AND Timothy

Didn’t post yesterday, obviously (if you are daily subscribers…all 2 of you!) It was one busy day! Today was Day #2 of the week-long intensive course on John. “Intensive” hardly means how it sounds…we’ve had a lot of fun. This is the congregation we have known the longest, first planted by one of our former colleagues, Greg Bailey. So our relationships go way back at the Kaiteme church (ky-tim-ay).

It is a challenge teaching a group consisting of 20% literates, and 80% non-literates! But I choose to use both, allowing the literates to help us navigate the written word and the non-literates lead on the memorization. It’s amazing how difficult it is for the LITERATE ones to memorize things, while the non-literates are by-an-large excellent memorizers (is that a word?) It’s a strange phenomenon…literacy is called by some as the “dumbing down of our minds.” They mean that we are born as oral learners, completely non-literate. By that, our senses are to be able to hear things and remember them well…but as we learn the skill of reading, our capacities are “dumbed-down” so that we become dependent on the written page. Not completely, across-the-board accurate, but it’s amazing how close it is!

In the introduction to John’s gospel, one of the first things I asked was “did John the Baptist write this?” Keeping in mind these are all first-generation Christians…75% of the attendees said, “Yes”. So we fixed that first. I went through and explained all the different stories (well, not ALL) about John the Baptist and the author John (they, as we do, got a kick out of the fact that John refers to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved”…sounds kinda sure of himself, huh?!) For a group of about 25, most have very little knowledge of the Bible, its history, or its table of contents (even the literate ones). So we were having to memorize Matthew, Mark, Luke and John...it’s so wild to teach people who are so new in their understanding of Christianity and God’s Word.

I’ll let you link here to see our points of memorization (scroll down on that post...did this same lesson at the Dekpo church a while back)…5 truth statements gleaned from the gospel…this group has done quite well with remembering…today, most everyone could say something from all 5 truth statements. Again, probably says something to their oral learning culture (I didn’t write these statements on any chalkboard…just recited them orally).

Today, we got as far as Jesus healing the man’s son in chapter 5. We’ll take a break tomorrow (Market Day…happens every 4 days). On Thursday, we’ll pick up with Jesus feeding the 5000 and Him being the Bread of Life. Then Friday and then Saturday and we’ll be done…whew!

OK, now for the real news of today….right as I thought I would go into Jesus’ feeding of the 5000 (postponed until Thursday now), Timothy had an accident. He was playing outside like he always does, this time just about 50 feet from me. I heard someone gasp, and I turned to see my 2-year-old man underneath one of the bicycles brought by one of the church members (Timothy was playing with it and it fell on him). My first reaction was frustration, as it interrupted my meeting. Then I heard someone else obviously more compassionate yell, “he’s injured.” Capturing my attention a bit more, I then saw blood covering his head and face. That caught my attention quickly! Kelly came out and we immediately rushed him inside, surrounded by every member of the class. After cleaning him up, we did see that some part of the bike had punctured the top of his head and scraped up several other parts. After a couple of minutes, the bleeding stopped and he calmed down. It was very scary…remembering two other major concussions Tori had when she was exactly Timothy’s age. But Timothy never lost consciousness or stopped breathing, so we were confident that although in a lot of pain and very frightened himself, he’d be OK. Within the hour, he was outside playing again. He still has some pain (I love hearing him say “Daddy, it hurt” in his cute 2-year-old voice), but took a good long nap (with some occasional parental supervision just to make sure), and he ate well. Tylenol and Motrin did some wonders and he was back to playing in his usual way this evening. So scary with kids, isn’t it? But once again, we praise God for His protection…it could have been so much worse. Thank you Lord!!