Last Friday, February 28, was significant in two ways. First, it was two years to the day that we signed our first contract with Dalat International School, making a decision to move to Malaysia. Second, it was the day my Grade 2 students performed a chapel for the rest of the elementary school and parents who attended. It was a huge experience for me, that really stretched my faith. It was probably the biggest thing (aside from our wedding) that I have ever planned. About 2 weeks before the chapel a sentence came into my head that was by the missionary William Carey. The sentence was: Attempt great things for God, expect great things from God. Now William Carey was doing much greater things than me but still, this sentence was a huge encouragement to me in the days leading up to February 28th because I knew that for the chapel to come together it was beyond me to do it but God had to bring everything together. And he did.
It started with writing a script which I had never done before. Almost from the beginning of the school year I was thinking of this chapel that I had to do and I kept thinking about what I was going to do for it. It was a very big thing in my mind. The theme for the school this year is 'Radical: Living a Life of Conviction' and I knew that I wanted to do a chapel around this theme. Right from the beginning I felt like God was telling me to do a play on Samson but I kept resisting because I felt it was a complicated story (for example about Delilah, and Samson killing so many people, and Samson's fiance being given to his best friend, etc). I also was stymied for how to have Grade 2 students portray the story of Samson, and also ensure that children as young as three years old (who would be in the chapel) could understand it. The students in my class really liked the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho this year so I wondered if or how to work that in. On the last day before Christmas break I wrote my first draft of my script that included three songs with actions (I later dropped one of the songs because we ran out of time to practice the actions), a mini-play about Joshua radically obeying God and trusting the walls of Jericho would fall, a mini-play about Esther coming before the king taking the radical step of hoping the king would hold out his sceptor to her, and I also planned to have some students tell about radical things that God has done in their life. But the idea of including at least part of the story of Samson, or even changing the whole chapel to just do the story of Samson kept coming to me. About five weeks before the chapel I just decided to jump in and include part of Samson's story and ignore my butterflies and hesitations about including especially that part.
With about 4 weeks to go I assigned parts but saved the Samson part for last as I knew that it was going to be a bit tricky perhaps for any boy to agree to do that part, for one reason because he would be laughed at as soon as he came on stage with long hair and he would also have to ham it up a bit to show how strong he was as that character. The student who I had hoped would agree to take the part, did agree! I was surprised he agreed and very happy about it and truthfully hadn't expected him to say 'yes'. I mentioned what I was doing to the elementary music teacher and she referred me to a website that had actions for the main song for my chapel so I didn't have to come up from scratch with the actions. She even agreed to spend some music class time practicing that song. I told my teaching assistant about my ideas about building a wall of Jericho and he just ran with it and made it even better than my vision for it. My next concern was to find a wig with long hair but it had to be suitable for a male look. These kinds of things are not easy to come by here in Malaysia. I asked the high school drama teacher about the wig and costumes and he told me he was sure there were wigs in the "drama closet". I went to look but there were only short wigs, mostly suitable for the look of an old person. Then I started to worry a bit more because I had already committed to the Samson mini-play. I asked another teacher who has done drama before and amazingly she found a long-haired wig in a back room of the school. I found costumes that could work, adapting a tan coloured monk's type robe to become a lion by shortening the sleeves and hem and adding a gold tinsel garland around the hood. I was also excited the day it clicked in my head that I had a ram's horn for the Joshua play; I had bought one in Israel at Christmas without even thinking to use it in my chapel. I was starting to get excited to see all the parts come together but I was also getting anxious as the day of the performance was coming closer. I was praying regularly for this event. Most of all, I was happy to see the students continually be excited about their parts and the music and be willing to speak about a radical event in their life even though they had to practice over and over. Meanwhile I was also putting together a PowerPoint to show some pictures to help explain parts of the plays, for example, a drawn rendition of the walls of Jericho, what the current strongest man in the world looks like to compare him to Samson, and some artwork the students coloured of Queen Esther.
Our first rehearsal in the chapel - the Monday before our performance - was a bomb; it was terrible. A parent of one of my students (one who was playing Joshua in the play) is in charge of supervising in the chapel and operating the sound and screen system there and he probably thought it was not going to go well, because certainly that is what I was thinking. I echoed those words from William Carey continually through my head. I consoled myself that Monday by talking to Garth after school about it; he was a good listener. A chocolate blended blog with pearls from the school store also helped. It all started to come together the next rehearsal though. Thursday night I went to bed early because I was so tired but woke up unexpectedly about midnight with the thought that maybe the preschool children would be scared when the wall of Jericho came crashing down (in reality a bunch of boxes with stone facades on their fronts) with all the shouting that comes beforehand and the sound of the ram's horn. There I was at 1:00 in the morning typing an email to all four preschool teachers to think about prewarning their students about this, and also about the sudden appearance of a lion during the Samson portion.
The chapel went very well. The students were happy with how they did. We had juice and brownies back in our classroom to celebrate, we prayed and thanked God for being with each of us, and then jumped into the rest of our day. Here are some pictures (unfortunately I can't access the original pictures so the only ones I can show are in my newsletter).
