Bible Reading: Matthew 5:13-16; Luke 8:16; John 5:24

"Help! It's not working! Troooooy!"

Troy stepped into the kitchen to see his little sister's hands covered in purple glue. "Crafting again, Emmy? What are you trying to do?"

Emma blew a curl off her forehead in frustration. "I'm trying to make slime! I have glue, water, and baking soda. Look at this, it's just a sticky mess! Not slimy at all."

"You forgot the activator." Troy pointed to step four of the recipe. "You need contact lens solution--I'll get you some of mine."

"What does an activator do?" Emma asked when Troy returned with the missing ingredient.

"An activator reacts with the rest of your ingredients and transforms them into something new--in this case, slime! Slime happens when you mix the liquid substance in your glue with the boric acid in an activator. This fun transformation is called cross-linking."

Troy added the activator to his sister's bowl and watched her stir it in. "It's so slimy!" Emma held her slime in front of Troy's face with a grin. "Thanks for helping me!"

"No problem, sis. Hey, did you know that you helped me?"

"I did?" Emma poked her slime. "How?"

"Before you called for help, I was thinking about some friends of mine. They don't know Jesus and have started doing some stuff that's not good for them. Instead of talking to them about it, I just stayed away from them. But God used your slime project to remind me that I should do something different."

"What's that?" Emma asked.

"Since I have God's Spirit in me, I can be an activator to those around me who are in darkness. I have His light, and I need to shine it to others. I don't have to participate in the wrong things my friends are doing, but I can choose to show them a better way. I can tell my friends about a different kind of cross-linking: Jesus died on the cross and rose again so we could cross over from death to life and be transformed!"

Emma raised her slime in the air. "Activators make everything better!"

–Savannah Coleman