Remembering the Past

I just made a photo book for our family for the year 2007. I'm that behind on having photos printed! I finally put the last of the 2006 photos in our album and called those albums "done". There was a sale on books I've wanted to try, so I took advantage and went to the next year. It took me two days to make the 34 page book. I'll now go back and start having photo books made for the subsequent years (okay, so I just looked up subsequent to make sure I used it correctly, how sad is that?) My goal is to make the books and then order them when there's a sale.

So, that brings me to the post at hand. The past.
Three years ago I was teaching junior high Sunday school to a great group of students. I had just wrapped up a ladies study on the tabernacle in the Old Testament (Beth Moore's A Woman's Heart) in the fall of '06. It was so incredibly powerful to me that I chose to teach the basics to the students in my class.
We read through the passages in Exodus and figured out what it would have looked like. Then, I got the crazy idea that we should build a replica. There is actually a museum in Lancaster, PA that has a tabernacle replica (about 45 minutes from where we were living in Harrisburg). But, there's nothing like using your own hands to create something to make your head and heart more fully grasp the concepts.
Our church in Harrisburg owned a very large old school building. The youth ministry had the old wood shop area. We had a huge room in which to build our replica.
So, we measured things and tried to lay them out to scale as much as possible. Joel built most of the pieces himself and the students helped paint it. They also helped come up with the facts we would share as we gave tours to the adults in our church.We ended up having a youth worship service where we offered an 'experiential worship' component centered around the different parts of the tabernacle (a place to lay down your sins as they did on the brazen altar, washing your hands as they did in the laver, lighting candles as the priests did on the lampstand, ... finally coming to tear up the papers on which our sins were written as we sprinkled them over the ark of the covenant). I remember it being a really neat experience. I heard many adults talking about how neat it was to see the symbolism and understand some of it.I came across these pictures as I was creating the photo album for 2007. What a treasure to go back and reflect on the neat things God allowed me to be part of in years past.
I found this neat website that seems to have lots of information for those interested.