Scavenger Hunt

Last week was the first full week of school with students, so with that I had a lot of things for the kids to learn. I had to review the rules, expectations and consequences for my classroom. For the remainder of class I decided to play a game as a review for where the art supplies were located. Majority of my students have been coming to the art room since they were in first grade so I figured the game I had for them would be somewhat simple.

Each class had to do a scavenger hunt, I had a list of items and tasks for their team to complete in order to check the tasks off the list and ultimately win! It was things like “find a red marker”, “put on an apron, and then hang it up the correct way”, “write down classroom rule #3 on the back of this paper” and so on . . . . . NOW some kids were really into it, and searched really hard to find everything on their own. Some kids were extremely lazy and just wanted me to show them where everything was. And some went really fast because they remembered where most things were from the previous year. As I did this game with the kids some 26 times (I have a lot of students), I began relating it to my spiritual walk . . . . .
I know that God is not a God of confusion, but I think sometimes we are like little kids on a scavenger hunt. Some days we want to work so hard to see God’s blessings. Other days I wake up really lazy and exhausted, I don’t really want to search for blessings, I just want to wallow in my misery. Then there are times that I have to do my best to remember past blessings and draw from those to continue on in my walk. 




What I learned in all of this is that just like my art room is filled with lots of little blessing (all of my supplies), so are our lives.  The kids never would have fully embraced what is in the room if they had not been searching for it or remembering it. I have never seen kids get so excited to find a red marker, or put on an apron.  It’s the same in our lives, how are we going to fully embrace the blessings that our lives are filled with if were not willing to do the work to recognize them. Sometimes, like some of my students, we just get lazy and we expect other people to fill that void for us. I will be the first to admit, there are some days that I just want to be a lazy complainer, but when I waste my time complaining I’m letting multiple blessing go right by without being noticed. So take the challenge of going on a blessings scavenger hunt and see what you find, it might not be what, where or when you expect it but God desires to bless us and for that alone we have so much to be thankful for!