This morning for our all age, all together bit of the service I told the story of "the man with wibbly-wobbly legs"... a telling of the the Markan narrative of the four friends who brought their disabled friend to see jesus, climbed on the roof of the house and broke through to gain acess to Jesus.  But this telling requires as a visual aid four identical strips of card joined together end-to-end with paper fasteners so that you can manipulate them into different shapes... a house, a hole, a bed being lowered and, of course, some wibbly wobbly legs.  It went down well, it never fails to... it is simple and intriguing how these bits of connected card can become images for the story.  And it intrigues me that it never fails to go down so well, because I first saw it around forty years ago in a URC in Northamptonshire.

Which got me wondering, which are the stories (or all age talks or children's addresses or whatever name we prefer) that stick in the mind and why.  Back in those teenage years, I recall one of the GB/Sunday School leaders saying she recalled a visiting preacher who, as he told his story, had put together a fishing rod; she had no recollection of the message, but she recalled how she had watched, spellbound, as the rod was assembled.  There is one I recall for all the wrong reasons, as it was someone telling about a particular (now viewed with suspicion) charismatic evangelist and the sentence, allegedly translated as "in the morning I see a man ahead of me" recalled independently by myself and my (photographic memory) sister as "um bongo titty phoowayo".  Even if it was genuine, it wasn't the best thing to say when a load of teenagers were in the congregation...

Of course, I have no way of knowing which, if any, of the stories or activities I offer will lodge in the memories of anyone  who hears them.

Here is a version of the wibbly-wobbly man told by an American woman... not quite how I tell (I don't ever add on the object lesson/now let's work in the cross bit) it but worth a look see...