This past week, my student jugglers- LOL- had two shows in the same day.  We loaded up the van at the start of the day and headed for Living Waters Christian chool, our competitors on the soccer field, but our Christan brethren in chapel.  When we arrived, everyone was thrilled to see how large their sanctuary is.  We would have plenty of room to work.  But once we started to warm up, several of the kids found the dark background hard to work in.  This provided a great lesson in flexibility and learning to adjust.  The next challenge came when we realized Dillon forgot his rip-stick, a skateboard of sortswith only wheels running down the center that is propelled by shifting one's weight.  Dillon normally makes his first entrance riding this across stage while juggling.  Fortunately, Dillon is an expert in doing the worm, and made his entrance that way instead.

Living Waters has a much larger student body, and the service was for everyone from Pre-K through high school, so we had our largest audience of the year.  And LOL rose to the challenge.  Adjustments made to the background during warm ups were beneficial.  We even included our machete medley routine for the first time this year.  Killian had a hard time with these knives during warm ups,and I was hesitant to let him try it in the show. He went for it, though, and was flawless.  

This was just one of many hghlights of the chapel program.  And the audience went wild throughout.  More importantly, these two groups of Christian school kids had meaningful fellowship together.

After lunch a debriefing back at the school, we then headed north for a show at the Lewiston Root Cellar.  This is an inner city mission working closely with immigrants and refugees, primarily from Africa, and we were performing for their after school program. .  We arrived intentionally early so that we could interact with their kids as they arrived.  By 3:15, these two very different groups of kids were in the park riding bikes, pogo sticking, shooting hoops and juggling together.  I met a young adult from China who has only been here three months. Before long, I had Ezra teaching him some basic juggling.  

You'd thnk after all this the LOL kids would be tired, but this show was as good as the first.  For the first time, the Root Cellar audience combined both their elementary and teen groups for us, and all ages loved it. Again, the machete medley went well.  Elana did three battle axes, and Jake closed this new routine with an axe, a machete and a sickle.  This show also provided the opportunity for tihs year's first 8th grade solo.  Maddie performed hers with a combination of juggling and illusions.  She's always so confident on stage, and performed it flawlessly.  

Since the Root Cellar orks with so many African refugees and many of them are Muslim, the leadership of the Root Cellar is always careful with how far to go with the biblical story of redemption.  This is not 'watering down' the Gospel, it is building bridges, and carefully teaching their neighbors without alienating them. But this time we were told that they were ready for us to introduce the resurrection.  What a privilege to be among the first to share this vital part of the Gospel story.  

As soon as we were done, one of the Root Cellar leaders followed up our show with a review of the Easter story.  We were truly cross-cultural missionaries that afternoon, and my students experienced a lot.