This past Sunday, I was a sub for the 8-11 year old Sunday School class. Disappointed with some of the curriculum’s “storybook” ish  way of telling historical Bible accounts; I reached for my own children’s world atlas and decided to point out modern day Middle Eastern countries on a map and “connect the dots” with history and present. The maps provided with the curriculum were cartoon, uber-colorful, and had the stereotypical Bible-looking people on them. I wanted to remind the kids of where the Bible took place, and how those places look today.

As I finished the lesson and took out my atlas, I began to talk of how the places in the Bible were REAL- we often forget where events took place.

I pointed out London, Washington DC, and then Jerusalem, making a connection that Jerusalem still exists today along with all the “modern” cities. One girl shouted out, “It’s an actual city?” when she saw it on the map.

I showed them Damascus, and the area Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar’s palace might have been located. We must’ve been distracted for seven or eight minutes, as they asked questions about places, where rivers were, if such and such a place was still around, surprised to see the Galilee and Red Seas were a “real” place.

As I showed the kids fairly recent pictures of people picking fruit from olive trees, Bedouins with camels, people in oases, and caravans in deserts; one girl said “They look like real people. Are these fake?” Wow.  It seemed it had never occurred to them that the Bible was a real, live, history book full of things that really happened. The little girl disbelieved at first because she was used to seeing a felt Jesus up on the flannelgraph or cartoon Paul in a turban printed on a poster, not Bedouins in Bible-like robes riding camels across the Saudi Arabian Desert!

No wonder kids are Already Gone.

More to come.

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