Children's Liturgy Sunday October 29th 2006

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In today's Gospel, Bartimaeus was cured of his blindness because he had faith. God must have given him the good idea to cry out to Jesus, calling him 'Son of David', because this links Jesus to the line of kingship.
Bartimaeus was prepared to listen, trust and be guided. In his heart, he could see the truth that Jesus was sent by God as the Messiah, even before his eyes were cured.

We talked about what it must be like to be blind and need to rely on others. We looked at the model we had made of Frankie the guide dog we all know, including the writing on his coat/bag, which says 'Trust' in both everyday lettering and in Braille, the alphabet used by blind people.

We played a game, searching for things with our eyes closed, whilst a friend tried to guide us.
When we could not see, we felt puzzled, confused, unstable and frightened. Other people can make mistakes.
When we tried to guide our friends, it was hard work and scary, because we did not want our friends to hurt themselves.
We also make mistakes sometimes.
We realised how trusting we need to be to be led by other people, by a guide dog, by God.
Guide dogs are only trained to look after people; God loves us all the time and always has. We are sure God does not want us to hurt ourselves.

We thought about times in our lives when we feel we cannot see the way things are going to turn out, or we don't know which choices to make.
We concentrated on how each object has a different texture, which means its surface feels different to touch. We looked at the Braille alphabet, thinking how hard it must be to learn to read in a new way. We realise we have to learn and be open-minded so we can read God's love in our hearts. We read and felt our 'Touchy/Feely' prayer. Each letter has a different texture. Some letters use raised dots in the Braille alphabet.

When we walked back into church, to the music, 'How much is that doggie in the window', our guide dog, Frankie, led the way. Frankie took our prayers, in the shape of the objects we have found and placed in his coat/bag.