The Bible According to Eliana

When I was a kid, our family acquired some felt Bible story visuals to use in our missionary work. There were hundreds of pieces--people, animals, scenery, buildings. I remember playing with these visuals for hours, retelling Bible stories or just making up my own. To my great delight, my mother recently passed these visuals on to my sister and I to use with our children. It was like seeing old friends agian, and I was excited that Eliana seemed to have the same enthusiasm I had for retelling stories and creating her own imanginative recountings. Far from accurate, I love listening to her tales and often laugh out loud at her combination of Bible characters and settings. Here's a snippet of a story I heard while watching her play with her "felt stuff" one day: Along came Sarai and she wanted to pay money cuz she didn't have any children. Along came an angel and siad, "What are you doing in my temple? Oh, okay, maybe I'll go back to Sarah's house." Along came the praying guy, praying for her to have children. Here comes along Abram. Know what? There were trees in the garden. Know what? The evil one put the trees on there and then there was one tree. Then the temple came on the rock. Abram and Sarah were talking to each other in the temple. Along came Elijah and he wanted to talk to them too. And there's Elijah's wife Sarai. God told Noah to build a big boat and Noah said, "No." So Jonah prayed to God and went inside Nineveh. And the angel went inside Nineveh too. The angel's name is God, not Gabriel. Then Sarah came inside Nineveh. Then Abram came and they all played around in Nineveh until it was time to go to sleep on the good grass. About this time Chris came into the room and gave an attempt to bring more depth and accuracy to her story. "Eliana, what was the temple for?" "For two people." "What did they do in the temple?" "Just played games." As you can see, we have a long way to go in the Old Testament History department!