First Pres Kids met in person this week for Sunday School. We opened our theme of HOPE with some challenging brain teaser toys and a giant HOPE puzzle. We talked about how it feels to solve or get stuck trying to solve a puzzle. We also talked about how challenging it can be when we are working with pieces but can't see the full picture. We explored the idea that life can sometimes feel like a series of challenging puzzles. We played a game of story cube. Together we formed a story using the symbols and our imagination. It was impossible to predict where the stories would go and how they would end. In this week's Bible story, the story of Lazarus ended in a much different way than his family expected. Jesus brought him back from death! Miraculous stories like this teach us about HOPE - believing something good can come out of something bad.  

In virtual Sunday School, we opened our class with a different kind of puzzle...guess the animal by emojis. We discovered that one of the animals in our puzzle played a big part in our Bible story - the story of Palm Sunday.  We learned that the people waited a long time for Jesus to arrive just as we sometimes have to wait a long time for things we want. We did a volcano science experiment and learned some cool facts along the way. An important one we learned is that there are 3 different groups of volcanoes based on their activity. If a volcano is ACTIVE, that means it still erupts. If it is EXTINCT, that means it no longer erupts. If it's DORMANT, that means it's not erupting right now but could at any time. Our prayer requests can sometimes look like dormant volcanoes. Even when it looks like nothing is happening on the outside, God is working behind the scenes. 

In virtual Sunday School, we opened our lesson with a bunch of riddles - tricky questions that we mostly couldn't figure out answers to! We learned that Thomas had big questions and doubts when he heard that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to his friends. We watched a magic trick - an item (representing Jesus' body) sealed in multiple envelopes (representing the measures taken to secure his body) disappeared before our eyes! Although we knew it was a trick, we still had questions about how it was done and this put the questions and doubts about the real life event of Jesus' body into perspective! In life, we will all experience questions and doubts. Hope is trusting God even when we don't have the answers in front of us.