Tea Rex
Connection to Love Your Neighbor
This week, we're having a tea party to help us and our kids understand the command to "love your neighbor" more fully. Yep, a tea party! And before you dismiss this story for little girls, trust me, your sons will appreciate this children's book just as much! Our featured book is Tea Rex by Molly Idle.
P.S. I love tea parties. My husband and daughter started a Mother's Day tradition for me with a tea party in our garden, complete with a fancy tea set and fun hats and of course some pretty blooms. If you're needing ideas for spoiling a special Momma in your life, I recommend a tea party. As Will said last year as we sat down, "I ate before, because there never is much food in these finger sandwiches..." Goofball, how I love him and his heart for his girls.
Here are a few thoughts to help prepare you for this intentional pause with your little one(s). I like to use a 3-Connection strategy in the following order:
· Connect with Me
· Connect with Another Book/Story I Know
· Connect with My World / My Reality
After this, I like to lead us through a simple prayer. Whether it’s bedtime or playtime, it’s important to teach our kids we can talk to God whenever, wherever we are. This is an easy way to model this with them.
Connect With Me
Before reading Tea Rex, I like to start with an opening question. This helps the reader (child) prepare to connect their own experiences with the story. This is an important step if the application of the story, usually the moral/lesson, is going to “stick.” Consider asking questions like:
· Describe your perfect tea party for me.
· Think of someone you know who is different than you and is sometimes hard for you to get along with. Why is this so?
Read the Story
If you're not familiar with this story or you'd like to read/watch the digital version, you can watch it here:
I recommend reading the story to your child or if your child is able, read together. Reading together can take on many forms, such as:
· The child reads independently only pausing when help sounding out/context clues from illustration is needed
· Help build stamina – child reads one page, adult reads the next, so on.
· Adult primarily reads but child reads the page(s) they know (especially true if this is a book which has been read before and is familiar to the child)
· Adult primarily reads and points to each word as he/she reads and allows the child to read certain sight words known, such as “the” or “cat” etc.
· Adult reads the words while the child enjoys (and “reads”) the pictures.
Connect With Another Book/Story I Know
After reading Tea Rex, it’s time to help the child make a deeper connection – this time to another book or story they know. To help bring a spiritual truth to a secular story, help guide the child to remember biblical stories they know, or ones you can introduce to them. Guiding questions for this title may be similar to the following:
· Imagine greeting a dinosaur in a bowtie at the door! What would you do if it were you?
· The little girl kept trying so hard to have all the right things for a "perfect" tea party: dainty chairs, floppy hat, breakable plates, miniature pastry bites, extra cups and napkins, music, and don't forget to smile! She was so eager at the beginning of the book. How did she look when the dinosaur left her house? (Melting from exhaustion.)
· There's a big difference between hospitality and entertaining. The girl in this story shows us what happens when we're focused on entertaining our guests - we end up totally exhausted when things don't go as expected. But, hospitality isn't focused on the details of the party but our hearts for our guests.
· The Bible talks a lot about hospitality and how God wants us to treat others, even people who don't look like us - like the dinosaur in this story. Let’s read about it in the Bible, recorded in the book of Leviticus in chapter 19:33-34. (Text provided below. Depending on how much time you have, you may choose to read this scripture aloud together or provide a summary of this story now and read it during the next story time read aloud you share.)
When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. - Leviticus 19:33-34
· Do you know what a "foreigner" is? A foreigner is someone who is from somewhere else. They may look different than you, wear different clothes than you, eat different food than you, talk differently than you, and think and believe differently than you. But does that matter to God? Not one bit! He tells us to treat them well, as if there were no differences between us and them. God is clear we are to love them, because he is God and he created all of us.
Connect with My World/Reality
Sometimes though, we don't want to open the door and be hospitable to people who are different than us.
Instead, we pull out our invisible markers and draw a line between us and them. If we were to zoom out and see all of our relationships mapped out, then one by one add the transparent layers of marker lines we've drawn between us and them, it would look like a page full of scribbles - nothing short of chaos. And chaos is our reality without God. From the very beginning, in Genesis, when God created the world, he hovered over the chaos and spoke order into the chaos. This command is one of the ways God spoke order into the chaos of our relationships.
He knew we would encounter people who are different than us and face chaotic relationships, and he knew we would be tempted to justify tolerating others and drawing lines between us and them. When the religious leaders asked Jesus, out of the 613 laws, which was the greatest, he answered:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” - Matthew 22:37-40
The first - Love the Lord your God with all you have - is even more familiar to the Jews in ancient Jerusalem than the Golden Rule is to us. They referred to this command as the Shema, and they quoted it daily. And, like the things we do daily - like brushing our teeth, it becomes so familiar, it's significance is sometimes lost in the repetition. Jesus was saying, "Hmm, which command is most important? You know that one you say everyday? Live it. Don't let it just be words only, but let it seep down into your heart. Everything flows from your devotion to God."
But, he doesn't stop there, even though they only asked for one. He continued, "Love your neighbor as yourself." We attribute this to Jesus in the New Testament, but Jesus was quoting the law in Leviticus 19 that we read earlier which outlines how to treat others, saying "Love your neighbor as yourself" in verse 18. You see, this was God's command from the beginning.
Interestingly, he says, "the second is like it." All of your life, every choice you make, flows out of your heart. Let love rule in your heart. Let God rule in your heart. Then, and only then, can you overcome the tangled temptation for sin - like that temptation to tolerate or the temptation to take the cap off that marker and draw some lines between us and them.
It is only when we connect with God first, then with ourselves, that we then connect with others in a meaningful and selfless way. Here's the thing: God loves them as much as He loves us.
Family Memory Verse Challenge:
Matthew 22:39 (The Message) tells us:
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Tips to make it "stick" -
Save this as your phone wallpaper or home screen as a reminder to say this together in all your comings and goings this week.
Print or copy this verse to a post-it note to put on the fridge or a family memo board.
Write it on a napkin to add to your child's lunchbox.
Write it together with chalk on the sidewalk one afternoon or draw pictures of the "good" you see God provide for you and your family.
Then ask your child(ren): How can we practice loving others, especially those who are harder to love, this week?
Pray Together
Let’s pray together.
God, thank you for giving us commands to help us and thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit to help us live out your commands as Jesus did. I confess of not loving my neighbor as myself. Help me to love others the way you love me. Specifically, help me to love: ______________. We love you and we honor you with our words and our actions. In Jesus’ name, amen.
May we be strengthened as we soak our minds in the truth of scripture and joy as we remember God's unconditional love for us, giving all of Himself for us. May we experience peace in our relationships with others as we practice loving them and extending grace to them since we have freely received grace from God through Christ, and may we rest in His great, unfathomable love for all of us.
For more examples of children's stories and how to connect "the Sunday stuff" to "the Monday stuff" for your family, check out the children's section at www.CandaceCofer.com
The good life, well it starts with a good day. Then another. Then another. Let's choose to live #TheGoodDay one day at a time.
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