Rich

Sunday morning we were huddled up with perhaps the smallest group I have had all year, half a dozen fourth and fifth graders sitting cross legged, squatting, or kneeling, all with their heads leaned in close for our final “talking time” before they ran off to meet their parents. The story had been about Zacchaeus, and several heads had flicked towards me at the presenter's statement that Jesus (because He was God) was the richest man on earth, so we started there.

“Alright, guys, was Jesus the richest man on earth?”

“Yes...” They all answer dutifully, but with a thousand extra words hiding in that pause, just waiting to be pulled out and brought to the light.

“God owns everything,” one of the boys jumps in to explain.

“How about when He lived here as a man, was He rich then?”

An emphatic, “No!” from the only girl of the week, but everyone else is still waiting, so I keep pushing.

“Did He have a big house?”

“No,” comes from a couple places around the circle, and I see my new kid glance up in almost surprise.

“Jesus was homeless.” My here-every-week-with-a-thousand-stories-pouring-from-his-lips kid expounds on his answer a little bit, but the ever short attention span of my group has wandered, so I try to reel them back in.

“Guys, did you hear that? Jesus was homeless.”

They nod, and their eyes soften, thinking.

“Why would He do that?” I probe a little bit more, half wondering if I'd used up my quota of deep answers earlier, when we were talking about forgiveness.

Then, one of my boys, who hasn't been there for months, looks me straight in the eyes and shrugs a little, “Because he wanted to go around and talk to as many people as He could.”

Jackpot.

Whatever the other kids were waiting to say has finally been vocalized, and we are deep in conversation, talking about things, and what we do with our things, and how we use our things (or lack of things) to connect to people and connect people to God.

This part is stereotypically our group, with a half dozen voices jumping all over each other and active fingers reaching out to draw emphasis lines on the carpet. But, somehow, they are all hearing and being heard.

One of the boys wants to be an artist and have the “cool house” where people like to come and hang out. The boy next to him wants to be an eye doctor, but I can see him rethinking his “stuff,” my name coming out as a half question, “Jessica?” before he figures it out for himself, “Never mind!” Our only girl wants to be a missionary, and one of the boys is about to jump on that subject when the main service lets out and we are passing around papers as they stream out of the room.

We broke a beanbag, ate cookies, played tag, picked up split peas (from the beanbag) off of the floor, had an ongoing conversation about choices, sang with the large group, listened to a story/lesson, examined the way that the Old Testament was broken up, and ran the discussion gamut from, “I have to forgive my dad when he calls me cuss words instead of my name,” to what they're going to do with their houses when they grow up.

Welcome to our small group.