"FAMILY ACTIVITY: Without speaking, one family member could
act out the part of one of the characters in 1 Kings 3:16-28.
The rest of the family should try to guess the identity of that character."
Sounds like a JW Vengeance Dad meme in the making...
THEY GUESSED WHICH BIBLE CHARACTER I WAS
AS I CUT THEM IN HALF
Of course, no actual death happens in this story, but the threat of violence and the drawing of a violent image is certainly present. The child draws the knife and the baby. As someone who has small kids, if I see my child connecting the dots on this picture, I'm going to have to throw it in the trash and demand that no further drawings of this sort be used for my children's activities. This really is not a proper way to involve children in worship. I can understand reading the stories to them--and that, I think, from the Christian perspective would be perfectly fine--but these pictures are going to stay with them.
I can still remember one of my earliest childhood memories from 'My Book of Bible Stories', with Abel lying in a pool of his own blood. I can remember staring at that picture for a long time, and feeling an emotion I couldn't fully quantify until I was much older--I felt disturbed.
But this is...hmm. I think I'd like to share this with my old therapist, just to see what she would say. There are worse things that will happen to the kids who grow up as JWs than drawing on this picture. But this is peculiar, at least.
--sd-7