Sunday, February 7, 2010

Trustworthiness Feb. 7 - What Happened in Class?

Today we focused on the virtue of Trustworthiness.

We told a great story about a littl e boy who was in a class that was working on calligraphy, and 'Abdu'l-Baha was taking the time to look at all of the children's work every week. 'Abdu'l-Baha would comment on the work always in an encouraging way, praising the children, and offering any help if the children needed any. The little boy in the story created some beautiful calligraphy one week, and when he showed it to 'Abdu'l-Baha, 'Abdu'l-Baha saw how beautiful it was and he praised the little boy's work and wrote a comment on it (something like, "Excellent work!"). The boy was so proud and happy that 'Abdu'l-Baha had praised his work. The next week, however, the boy realized at the end of the week that he didn't have a good quality calligraphy done to show 'Abdu'l-Baha. So instead of showing him his real work for the week, the boy took the calligraphy that 'Abdu'l-Baha had already praised the week before, tore off the comment that 'Abdu'l-Baha had written, and showed exactly the same work to 'Abdu'l-Baha. When 'Abdu'l-Baha saw the work, he said kindly, "That work looks familiar," and handed the work back to the boy without any praise, without any written comment. The boy realized that he had lost 'Abdu'l-Baha's trust by trying to trick him, and after that he never tried doing something like that again.


The kids enjoyed the story, and understood the meaning of it. Then we read a storybook called "The Big, Fat, Enormous Lie" by Marjorie Weinmen Sharmat (Unicorn Paperback). The kids really liked the story.


Because we started class quite late today, we skipped the music went straight to the craft, which was making "fortune tellers" - those paper triangle-folded games that you ask questions and then the paper reveals an answer. A sort of "searching for truth" game, however we knew it wasn't a trustworthy source to ask!