Teenagers are great

As I've mentioned before, Ruf and I work with the youth at our church. They're great entertainment, I have to say. Ruf had to stay home from church this morning because working in the yard yesterday brought on such a bad allergy attack that he was sick. So, I taught our middle schoolers alone this morning.

I have to preface this little story with some background. We've been working our way through the Old Testament with our middle schoolers. When we studied the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, one of the boys had an interesting version of the bible. When it came to the part where Elijah was taunting the prophets by asking where their god was, this boy's version said something to the effect of, "Maybe he's on the toilet!" Naturally, that got our class laughing hysterically.

Today we were in I Chronicles, studying the preparations for the building of the Jewish temple. We reviewed what we'd learned last week, part of which was the various roles of the Levites in the temple. The kids were piping up with the various tasks the Levites performed, such as making the bread, guarding the gates, how many people had keys to the tabernacle, etc. One of the kids joked by saying some were bringers of the toilet paper, which got another one (these were boys, btw) saying they plated the toilet with gold.

The kids were laughing hysterically at this point, but one of the girls who wasn't there last week looked totally confused and wanted to know why they would bother making a toilet gold. In her words, "Why make something gold that people are just going to poop in?" I clarified that there was no toilet in the temple; the boys were just making a joke. But then another girl asked, "So where did they go to the bathroom?" I told her I didn't know, and I don't think God really thought it important for us to know, since he didn't tell us about the people's facilities in the bible.

Of course, that got them all off on a tangent of wondering if they had porta-potties or latrines or what. I just had to laugh. It actually made me think of the Beverly Cleary book where Ramona is in kindergarten, and the kids are asking the teacher when the main character in a book went to the bathroom. I felt a bit like that teacher this morning, not quite knowing how to respond to such an earnest, but inconsequential question.

I made sure to tell Ruf about the fun that he missed in Sunday school today. He was just laughing and shaking his head.

On a more serious note, because Ruf was so sick last night from his time outside yesterday cutting up our fallen tree, I was worried about him trying to finish cleaning up the mess by himself today. A couple of the high school boys in our group have a lawn service, so I asked them if I could hire them to come help him today. They were a great help to Ruf, and those sweet boys tried to refuse payment. I made them take money since my intention all along was to pay them, but they were very reluctant to do so. Their mamas raised them well. :-)