Gideon: Mighty Warrior!
“The Lord is with you, mighty warrior,” says the angel of the Lord to the man cowering in a winepress as he threshes wheat to protect it from the enemies who have impoverished his people. (See Judges 6) Mighty warrior. I love how God sees the potential in us, because I’m certainly not feeling anywhere near mighty these days. I have, however, learned a lot about having grace for myself. I actually started writing this post about 6 weeks ago, when I was initially planning to teach Ian about the story of Gideon from Judges 7. But more than a month of sickness, a week in the hospital, a family funeral, relatives in town, another death in the family, and a trip across the country for a family reunion all contributed to a less than stellar homeschool experience. I shouldn’t say that. After all, we’ve been learning a lot about life. We just didn’t get to our Bible lesson very much. And I can accept that. We didn’t do even half of what we normally do for a Bible story, but you know what? It’s time to move on. Ian learned the story. We’ll hit it again down the road. Grace, Deanna, grace. Here’s what we did manage to do:
This week Over the last 6 weeks, we talked about the story of Gideon from the ABC Jesus Loves Me Week 12 lesson plan–not one of the most popular Bible stories, but a fun one nonetheless. The first thing we did (once I actually managed to start) was to read the story from Judges 7 during bedtime Bible stories. I’m not sure Ian remembered much of it, so the next Monday we started as usual with our flannelboard. I whittled Gideon’s army down to just three men, rather than three hundred, both to show the point that God won the battle with only a few men (we talked about how many there really were) and also so we could give each man a trumpet, a torch, and a jar.
Ian really liked the story and wanted to do it again, this time helping me pass out the items to each man. He couldn’t figure out why they had the jars, so to demonstrate how loud it must have been when the men broke them we went out to the garage and I shook our glass recycling box. It definitely made an impression. The boys wanted to grab the jars and smash them on the concrete, but thankfully they were quick to accept my explanation of why that would NOT be a good idea!
And that was pretty much all we did for Gideon. Never read it in a children’s Bible. No iPod playlist. No Bible notebook page. No memory verse.
But lots of grace and love flowing in our home. So thank you, Lord.