Using a salad bowl to spark family stories

“Do this to remember me.”
Love, Jesus

Remember the time… Jesus told us to remember?

You have it memorized. It was during that dinner that Jesus had with his disciples. You know. The last one. The one where Jesus invented Communion. Now every time we share the bread and the cup we remember what Jesus did for us.

What do you suppose would happen if we stopped telling stories to our children? Pretty soon, they’d forget! When the very first Passover occurred, God instructed Moses to tell the people to not forget this event. Every year on the anniversary of the first Passover, they were to tell their children the story of God’s intervention and their freedom from slavery in Egypt. (Read about this command in Exodus 12:24-27).

Are we finding enough occasions to tell our stories? How about around the family dinner table? Here’s an easy way to make sure that telling our stories happens.

Let’s make a salad!

Not that kind of salad. But our “recipe” does call for a salad bowl!

Before dinner take some slips of paper and write on them storytelling prompts. Things like…

• A summer story
• A school story
• I was embarrassed when…
• A celebration or holiday
• An adventure
• A food story
• A family joke
• My first memory
• I was afraid when…
• i knew God was involved when…
• I trusted God when…
• A question I’d like to ask God
• Add your own ideas!

Mix up all the pieces of paper in the salad bowl and place the bowl on the table during dinner. At the appropriate time, have each family member take a turn drawing a slip from the bowl and telling a story.

Jesus was celebrating a remembering-Passover-supper when he gave us new instructions to remember a different sort of event: Jesus’ death for us. May we never forget to tell the whole story!