This weekend, we took the youth group bowling. For those of us with an American perspective on life, this is a normal youth group activity, but for the students who meet with us every week this was a brand new experience. We took 20 + kids ranging in age from E6-Senior 2 (11 years old-17) to the local bowling alley. When we arrives, we quickly learned that about half the kids had never been bowling before and the other half had been maybe once or twice. We were in for an interesting evening.
After teaching to kids how to get shoes and balls and organizing them into lanes, we started bowling. Most of the kids kind of dropped their balls down the lane. We had quite a few falls and dozens of gutter balls, but were they those kids having fun. Every pin that got knocked down was applauded and high fived. Every time one of the students walked up to the lane, we held our breath in anticipation. As they got the hang of it, some of them started getting S, /, and X (splits, spares, and strikes).
In Taiwan, kids spend 97% of their time studying, at school, and in cram schools. They don't get a whole lot of time to be kids. They don't play around with their peers and they don't go out with their families. Academics rule their lives. Seeing the light in the kids' faces when they were allowed to just be kids was amazing. What a blessing to witness and what an answer to our prayers. New students came bowling with their friends and students we hadn't seen in months re-emerged.
Please pray that bao ling chiu opens the doors of our church to more kids as they find a place to relax and learn together about a God who doesn't care what schore they got on the JEPP but loves them without restraint.
2 comments:
Glad you were able to treat them to the experience! About 12 years ago, bowling was very popular island-wide. Almost every little town had a place to bowl. However, as is the case with many other fads here, too many alleys were open and they very quickly quit turning a profit. I'm guessing about 10 yrs ago more than 75% closed. At that time it would have been much more likely your kids would have gone bowling.
In Japan we have the same problem with kids being too busy to come to events. How did you get that many kids to come to bowling?
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