As an early childhood teacher, I have very few rules in the classroom and those rules are mostly for safety. I just finished reading in the Old Testament book of Exodus about their rules. Most of the time we think about the Ten Commandments. Ten is a manageable number, easy to remember. But there was actually more to their rules than just ten. Some rules had “fine print” to read as well.

Read Exodus 21 for further explanation.

There were rules for slavery. If it was one way when the slavery work began, then it was to finish the same way, unless something else happened during the slavery work.

There were rules for fighting and different consequences, depending upon who was involved in the fight.

There were rules for theft and different consequences, depending on what was stolen and who was the thief.

My, my, my … Thank goodness we don’t have quite so many detailed rules in the 21st Century or our short-attention minds might not be able to handle it.

I’ve heard one of my favorite authors, Len Sweet, use the phrase “It’s a Google world” many times. It definitely is a tech world. I have early childhood students in my classroom playing and working in the art center cutting paper and drawing pictures on paper. They fold the paper in half and stand one end up and say “look at my computer.”

To add to this Google world thought, I recently read a blog post describing how the church is like a rotary-dial phone in an iPhone world.