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This summer I had an incredible time with a couple of churches as the visiting missionary for their VBS clubs.

For one of them, I was asked to do 20 minutes each for 4 different age groups, the youngest being the preschoolers. Now you might remember....I LOVE kids, but trying to keep the attention of 40+ preschoolers in one tiny room for 20 minutes was definitely stretching hero inducing. Not to mention trying to teach them something valuable about missions in Africa, a topic completely outside of their realm of experience. When I was first trying to figure out what I was going to teach them, I was so worried that I would get into that room and the kids would take over. Or that I would stare into those little faces and completely blank. Or maybe that they would simply reach the end of the week having learned absolutely nothing.

That first Monday I went through the first 3 classes with ease, all the time questioning my plans for the preschool group. Before I knew it, they were there. Tumbling over arms and feet to pour themselves into my tiny classroom. I was pleasantly surprised that they didn't bite (well at least they didn't bite ME....), but they did certainly require much more voice power than anticipated. Squeezing bit and pieces of teaching throughout learning Ugandan children's songs, I actually finished my 20 minutes (and my voice!) before I knew it. Thankfully, the voice came back before the next morning, only to be lost again the next 2 days as well. By the end of the week, I knew that they had done a LOT of singing, hearing about God's love for all people, and repeating some Luganda words, but I still wasn't sure if they had absorbed anything at all.

Then one day later in the week, I saw one of the boys in his mother's arms animatedly talking as fast as he could. I could tell she couldn't quite get what he was saying as she looked a bit confusedly down into his small face. Suddenly, he caught glimpse of me, whirled around, pointed a tiny finger at me and said in a great big voice, '"Mom! That's HER!!!" Grinning, I walked to them and his mother hesitantly said, "he's telling me something about another language??" I smilingly prompted the little boy to do his recitation of the Luganda words again, and sure enough, he got just about all of them right!

I was just thrilled to have that small evidence that even the youngest ones were listening and were learning!!

p.s. please also pray for the 5 older ones that told me that God wants them to be missionaries too! Pray that they would not lose that vision, and the Lord would continue growing them up to be mighty warriors for His Gospel!

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