By Lynn Beardsley

Each year in the fall, the first graders of Paradise Pond learn about how our amazing God created animals. At the end of that unit, we as mentors challenge them to help toward sending the gift of an animal to a family through Heifer International. They watch a movie telling the story of how these Third World families care for and feed the animals, and see how, for instance, they then sell the animal’s milk for money to send their children to school.

Paradise Pond Blessing

The first graders are always amazed to see how families around the world live and are excited to help send them a “gift”! Because Jesus is our Lamb, we always choose to have the money go toward buying a lamb, and we devote six weeks to raising the money. There is one rule, however:  the first graders must earn the money they contribute, not simply ask for a donation from their parents. This gets their little minds working immediately.

Each week, the children who bring an offering get to tell the large group what they did to earn their money as they place it into our Heifer bucket. From cleaning their room, to lemonade stands, to raking the yard, to reading 10 books, and even doing their brother’s or sister’s chores…the kids are so creative. My heart melts whenever a child gives all his allowance or all her birthday money to buy our gift…and it happens every year.

This is such a great reminder of how God’s Spirit works among us, even the smallest of us. Joining with the generous giving of the children, we mentors in the Pond also contribute toward the gift, and one couple even matches what the children give.

After the sixth offering, we announce our gift and celebrate with the kids, who are always ecstatic. Our goal every year is to buy one lamb, and we restate that each week to the children. But so far, we have never bought one lamb. The first year, the first graders bought three lambs, the next year it was five. This past year, these six year olds raised enough money to purchase seven lambs!

We close our lamb project with a prayer that these families will know our True Lamb, Jesus.  Since we don’t have an actual lamb to touch, we place our Heifer offering bucket filled with money in the center of the room. The children then stretch out their hands and pray this blessing over the money which is used to buy the lambs. It’s definitely one of my favorite moments of our year together in the Pond.

As we bring scriptural principles to these children each week, our desire is always that they will apply what they’ve learned to their lives. Talk about an application! As a teacher, I can walk away from this unit knowing definitely knowing that they “got it”.