Happy Pagwa!

Today in class, we watched a short film about a little girl who loved to make a mess with anything she touched.  Her parents were very strict and they ended up leaving her with grandpa in hopes that she will learn a lesson.  Her grandpa took her to a religious celebration called "Pagwa" and it was acceptable to make a huge mess with powder.  Her grandpa understood how to connect with his granddaughter.  It would have been useless to try and teach her to act like a saint, because she has a crazy personality.  I can almost guarantee that the granddaughter learned a lot about the customs and traditions of that religion even when she was having the time of her life with the powder.  I can relate to this short film because I worked at a Christian camp all summer where we did not teach the gospel in the traditional way.  We could have sat the kids down in pews and lectured the gospel to them and still cover the basic information.  But God did not create children to learn that way.  Before anything else, kids are supposed to have fun, and if they weren't, they would be adults.  Instead, we taught the gospel in an interactive way.  We used games, crafts, and activities to explain the idea of Christ to our children.  By doing this, the kids stayed involved and actually looked forward to learning more about Jesus, and that is what it should be all about. Children should never be underestimated as to what they can learn.  They just do not learn by lectures and difficult books.  Our mission as their teachers is to educate them in a way that they enjoy what we teach them.  The children at my camp will never forget the summer they learned about their Savior, just like how that little girl will remember the day when her grandfather taught her about Pagwa for the rest of her life.