8 Gifts

At Sunday School yesterday, I started off the class with an interesting activity which required quite a bit of work beforehand, but hopefully got an important message through to the kids. I prepared 8 gifts… some were in nice boxes with ribbons and even one heart-shaped box, but some were wrapped in decorated plastic bags, and others were badly wrapped in old A4 paper or a box made of newspapers. I told the kids that each of them could choose one present each, and whatever was inside they could choose to keep it or they could choose to give it back to me if they didn’t want it. The girls, quite expectedly, all choose the nicely wrapped presents (also perhaps they got to choose before the boys), so the boys were left with the not so nicely wrapped prezzies. Unfortunately for the girls, when they opened up their boxes, they got crappy stuff like paper clips, stones and even a box of my old business cards. The boys with the crappily-wrapped prezzies, however got slightly nicer stuff like keychains and sweets.

This whole activity was to lead up to me teaching the story in Acts 10, which is about Peter meeting Cornelius, a Roman officer. Peter was a Jew and Cornelius was a Gentile, and back then the supposedly holy Jews were taught not to mix with the supposedly unholy scoundrels that were the Gentiles. But in this story, both Peter and Cornelius received visions and messages from God that led to them meeting each other. Once Peter found out that God was speaking to Corny too (or at least, that what I’m guessing all the kids at school used to call him), he learned a good lesson… that if God doesn’t discriminate between Jews or Gentiles, then he shouldn’t either.

If you haven’t already figured it out, the whole purpose of the 8 gifts was to teach my kids that the gifts are like people. There are some people who look nice, pretty, handsome or well-dressed, but they are aren’t very nice and are just full of crappiness. However, other people who may be poor, fat, ugly or look completely different can turn out to be nice, friendly, generous people. And of course, most people fall in between the two spectrums … but the main thing is that we cannot judge, discriminate or make fun of people based on their looks, coz’ even though they may look different from us and they have different cultures and languages, God still loves them the same as you and me, so we should love them the same too. And to further drive home the point, I had the wonderful idea of inviting Erhire, a Nigerian studying in Sunway who goes to our church, to come to my class and talk to the kids about his country’s culture and help them understand that even though he looks quite different from us, he is still a brother in Christ. Though later into the session I was beginning to think it wasn’t such a good idea after all, coz’ some of the kids were asking Erhire those weird questions that only kids will ask… like do they eat worms/lizards/bugs in Nigeria, and how tall is the tallest person in Nigeria (in cm). I had a hard time resisting the urge to facepalm.

Of course, teaching kids a lesson like this is simple enough. But getting them to believe it and live it is quite a different matter altogether… especially since practically their parents and practically all adults have some form of prejudice or another, which they will pass on to the kids. I have people in my own family who have nothing but unpleasant things to say about Africans... perhaps because of the many stories of Africans committing crimes in Malaysia, but I think it’s also because they just perceive black skinned people as ‘dirty’, unrefined people. Which totally ticks me off coz’ they don’t even know any African people and are just making judgments based on looks. I’ve met quite a few Africans like Erhire, who are all perfectly well educated, very friendly and fun people to hang out with.

Having said that though, I’m not totally blameless myself. It’s kind of hard not to sometimes make unkind generalizations about certain people, especially growing up in a country where the government condones giving handouts based on race, instead of merit. We all know what I’m talking about, so let’s leave it at that. Over time though, I’ve met people of this certain race that we all know about are also quite nice, usually generous and some quite hardworking (contrary to a certain dictionary that once defined this race as the laziest bunch of people on the planet. Needless to say, there was a big hue and cry, so they had to revise that definition. I do agree, that was a pretty mean definition).

Well anyway, before I start to blabber nonsense, I’m just saying… sometimes the disparity of living in reality and teaching rosy lessons in Sunday School gets to me.