Starting Over

It's an amazing thing to be alive.  You can see with your eyes.  You can hear with your ears.  What else?  You can smell with your nose!  And your fingers can touch.  Our bodies are wonderful, and God made us that way because he loves us. We can do wonderful things, to help people and to say nice things.  With our hands we can touch someone gently to show them we love them.  We can smile at people and make new friends.  When our heart is connected to God, we are thankful, and we can love other people. But what would happen if we forgot about God, and just wanted our own way?  What if nobody obeyed their mommies and daddies?  If we were all really bad, we wouldn't let anyone else play with our toys, and we would try to take things away from other people. We wouldn't want to live in a place like that, if people acted that way.  And it would make God sad, too.  Here's what happened. After Adam and Eve left the garden, they had many children.  And their children grew up and had children, and got married and had more children until there were lots of people living on the earth. Did they want to share and be gentle and kind?  No, the people started to be bad all the time. Even after they got a spanking they just wanted to do the same thing again.  When God looked in their hearts all he could see were bad ideas about how to be mean and hurt their friends.  God was sorry that he had made people.  He only found one man who was still listening to him and wanted to obey.  His name was Noah.  God told Noah what he was going to do. He was going start over.  There was going to be a flood of water that would cover the earth and end the life of everyone on the earth.  The water would get so high that it would destroy everything.  He wanted to save Noah and his family and the animals, so he told Noah to build a giant boat, called an ark.  He told Noah to make it out of gopher wood and cover it with tar, which is kind of like plastic, so that it wouldn't leak.  Noah and his family made the boat just like God told them to.  When it was ready God told Noah to get into the boat with his wife and his three sons, and their wives, eight people altogether.  Noah took animals into the ark with him, too.  Birds, sheep, horses, goats, pigs, you name it, he took it on the boat.  He took a male and a female, a mommy and a daddy.  Other animals followed Noah into the ark, too.  Two of every kind of animal went into the ark. Every kind of cow, every kind of creeping animal like lizards, frogs, and turtles, and every kind of bird.  Then it started to rain.  It rained for forty days and forty nights.  That is a long time t rain.  Can you count to forty? Let's rain down with our fingers and count the days. (to 40) The fountains that were under the land came up, too, and water covered the whole earth.  But Noah and his family were safe because the ark floated on top of the water.  The water got higher and higher until finally even the mountains were covered up.  The people and the animals that were in the ark stayed alive, but everything else died because there was so much water.  The ark came to a stop on top of a mountain.  It stopped raining. Noah opened the window and sent out a bird to see if there was a place to land, but the bird came back to him.  There He waited another week and tried it again, but the bird came back again. The water finally went down and down, like it does in the bathtub.  It keeps going down until the bathtub is dry. At last, he sent out a bird again, and when it didn't come back he knew the ground was dry.  God spoke to Noah and told him it was time to get out of the ark. All the animals got out, too, so that they could spread out and have babies again all over the earth.  Noah and his family came out and worshiped God.  God was glad. God loves people, and when the flood was over he said he would never do that again, no matter how bad people got.  God put a rainbow up in the sky to remind us that he loves us.  When you see a rainbow after it rains, you can remember how much God loves you.