“What Really Happened at the Hagan house!” (God card #37 – Super Glue)

So, you have purchased the God cards and looked over the handy poster that comes with them. You read the introduction, agreed with the importance of this endeavor and attempted to understand the “Getting Started” section, but you still aren’t quite sure how this works. So, I want to give you a picture of how it fleshed out in the Hagan house – step by step using the “Getting Started” section from the God cards poster to guide us along the way. It is one thing to tell you how to do it, but another thing to show you the Hagan people really doing it! And you will see we often take detours depending on the moment and what is interesting to Maya, Ada and Carson. And our family times never quite go as planned either. My family like yours is full of crazy – just take a peek!

God card #37 Super Glue – I believe Father God sticks with me.

1. Read through all the cards. I began looking through the pages and thinking which one should we talk about. At the time, I didn’t have the plan laid out, so I was just randomly choosing week by week.
2. Pray. “Father, which cards do you want to talk about? What have we been going through this week that would be relevant for some good discussion?” I thought about a dream that Ada had had about Father God fighting for her. So maybe I believe Father God fights for me. I noticed that we had not done any God cards towards the end of the alphabet, so maybe we should focus on something here. So, I just kept reading through the cards and verses in a posture of listening.
3. Choose a card. I went downstairs and picked up a book that I was reading. It had a prayer for our house that I had been meaning to show Ron. So, I thought it might be good to pray it together while we were having church. While reading it, I noticed the word: “Bethel.” It caught my attention, because I had just read that word in a verse in one of the God cards. When I came back upstairs, Carson comes in the kitchen with something he has just created. It was a house made from sticky blocks. I then read the verse and realized that Bethel meant “house of God.” Wow – Father God has just showed me in a matter of a few minutes what card we were to study that day. I had Carson bring the house and put it right in the middle of the table and said to everyone – “This is so cool. Father just told me what we are about to study and Carson just created it too!”
4. Read the “I believe” statement and talk about what it means. So, we read the statement and talked about glue. What does it do? How does it work?
5. Explore the verses – read. I then gave Maya, Ada and Carson each a verse making sure I gave to Carson the “Bethel” verse as I knew that it would be meaningful for him to share his house. They each read their verse on their own with Ron and I’s help.
6. Explore the verses – draw it, paint it, act it out or write. After reading their verse, they just plunged in to illustrating on some paper with markers. They are conditioned now to just start explaining it from their point of view. So, Carson wrote the “I believe” statement on his paper at the top, drew some glue in the middle with Genesis 35:3 inside and then wrote out the verse on another piece of paper. Ada looked up Isaiah 41:10 on the computer in The Message translation because that is really cool to her right now – to use Daddy’s computer and then to read it from The Message. She wrote the verse on some paper and then drew a happy face on another sheet. Maya looked up Daniel 3:25 and drew the fire pit, the four guys and wrote the verse at the top. After they finished their creations, they each presented their work. Presenting is important to them right now, so that is what we do.
7. Post the pictures and pray. We put all of this up on the family board, talked through each picture, read the “House Blessing” and then marveled at Carson’s constructed house and how it all fit together. We then put Carson’s house on one of our icon places in the kitchen. And then we prayed together. Later on that evening, Ron and I were looking at the board and I realized that we hadn’t done a picture nor told our story. We reminded ourselves how important it is that we engage with our own conversation too. So, there are always things we miss that we hope to do next time. Perhaps in the week we can add our picture. It will give us an opportunity to work it out again.
8. Talk about your pictures and words throughout the week. Later on that day, Maya began singing a popular song that was out: “whoa-oh, oh, oh, you and me baby, we’re stuck like glue” by Sugarland. And then stops in her tracks and says: “Hey, that is what we talked about this morning.” So, then all of us began singing the song and dancing about but we changed the words to “you and me, Father, we’re stuck like glue.” It gave us a chance to talk about Father God sticking with us all over again. And then I said the Isaiah verse over everyone. The next day, Maya and Ada wanted to paint. So, I told them to paint something to add to the family board. So, Maya painted the words to the song. This is now the third time we have drawn to this idea of Father God sticking to us like glue, and it is all in the natural flow of events. At dinner that evening, everyone was enjoying their dessert and Maya was having a fun dip from her valentine bag. All of the sudden, she says: “listen to what is on my fun dip stick – ‘stuck on you.’” The table was full of laughter and surprised faces as we felt his nearness in the smallest of details – a valentine fun dip! So, once again, we drew back to our topic for the week.