Three Year Olds

I am teaching a small group of three year olds in Sunday School. After singing we have 30 minutes together. Three-year-old children are wonderful. You never know what they’re going to come up with. Last week, for example, one child announced that her mother had a baby in her tummy. This was new information for all for us. The best part is that it was accurate! (I checked with her mom after church.)

But this age is a challenge for me. I plan something active, then a quiet activity, followed by something active again. Because these children are quite young I can go through many of these active/quiet sets in half an hour. Yet some days, no matter what I do, they lose interest. One day the four kids started playing Hide and Seek in the classroom. There was no way I could pull them back into the lesson. So I started looking for them. Now, there are not many places to hide in our classroom. And they all hide in the same place. The giggles helped me find them!

This ritual has become something we do every time at the end of class, they hide and I seek. It gives me time to clean up the room (I usually don’t find them right away of course — I need the break) and they laugh and enjoy it. I am grateful that God used this event that I viewed as a failure to build a sense of belonging and tradition for this class. Now it is something that I actually look forward to — and the kids do too.

Have you ever had a failure that turned into a blessing?  God uses my failures almost as much as he uses my successes. I can’t wait to see what I fail at next!