Last June 4-7, 2013, Emmanuel's Christian Family Life Ministries conducted the Operation Christmas Child Program. It is a program wherein Children are taught about Jesus Christ and they will be receiving donated gifts in shoe boxes.
During these days, classes have already started so it is very hard for us, the Sunday School teachers, to compromise with the schedule of the kids. We weren't able to make them go to church for almost a week to attend the teaching program anymore. But this didn't stop us either from pursuing this activity.
Instead of making the kids go to us, what we did is to go to them. Our head Sunday school teacher assigned us to different places to teach, some have partners, some didn't, depending on the number of children we are going to teach.
Since I only have less than ten students, I was assigned to go alone in Sitio Parugan. I didn't know if I will consider myself blessed that time because the venue where I will be teaching is the house of our Senior Pastor. I just had the feeling that I will feel like a teacher undergoing a class observation with our Senior Pastor as the supervisor who will observe me while I am teaching. That scenario actually happened but it was not that scary as I thought it would be anyway. Our Senior Pastor was just watching me for quite some time and will also be leaving after a few minutes, so I didn't feel like someone was observing me anymore.
After every meeting with the kids, we, the teachers, will have to go back to the church to meet each other also so that we can talk about and organize the graduation and gift giving program for the kids at the end of the week. We were also able to make this a bonding time for us since we were able to tell stories of our experiences with the kids. I was not surprised by how unique our experiences can be because of the fact that we are teaching different kids in different environment. So the stories of every teacher were really something interesting.
But although we had different experiences in different places with different kids, I know that we share the same goals and aspirations while doing this activity. We got to know kids better because we were able to know where they live and how they live. We share the same feeling of nervousness the very first day that we are going to face the children that mostly, we never knew before. We all heard different life stories from the children. We all learned how to love kids who didn't know Jesus Christ even if we didn't know them that much. We all sacrificed our time and effort all throughout this activity. And most especially, we learned that even kids have to know and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. And at the end, we know that we share the same rewarding feeling that we were able to share the love and salvation that we also received from God to these kids.
What we did is not really that hard and sacrificial unlike the others. Four days isn't enough to really make this kids know Jesus Christ better, but we know that we did what the Lord has told us to do and we were able to plant seeds to these children's heart and one day, we will see them growing and bearing fruits. :)
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