Last night at Youth Group we focused on three ways to experience God in our world right now. It seems to me that many Christians spend their faith life waiting and hoping for a future with God in heaven, so I wanted to spend a full evening thinking about how we experience God right here and now. I loved the format we used last night, all together for three large groups, each followed by 10-15 minutes of small group questions in the same room. Maybe it was just a great mix of students or the right questions, but it worked well. Deep conversations, good experiences, and a lot of fun. The worst part of the evening was my opening game - WAHH. Could it be we just had too large of a group? This game was one of my absolute favorites in Minnesota a year ago, and here we couldn't really get off the ground. Sure there were lots of laughs, but the game was fizzling and drying fast, so I pulled the plug and hope to restore it in a later week.
The evening began with a need to stall just a bit while food was prepared, so I attempted to lead the game of WAHH. The real ice breaking game was played after dinner, called Ships and Shores. One of our adult leaders led the game and did a great job. The basic premise of the game is follow silly commands until the group is whittled down to a single person who wins, kind of like Simon Says. There are several commands which force the participants to get in groups of 3 or 4 which works nicely to eliminate students as the game progresses. I was really proud of my leader and students for their inclusion of some of our differently abled students. Even as students were being called out, they were so generous by letting others stay in! so heart warming!
Our first experience was about allowing God to direct our lives: chaos into order. Each student was given a colored shape and instructed to find and sit with students with the same color. Once seated, the groups were given basic instructions (no talking, turning over their paper, or touching anyone else's shape) and then the goal: to form two squares from the their collective shapes. I just used tangram designs and had pre-printed a large Bible verse on the back of each square. The illustration was right on, allowing kids to debrief as they talked about how difficult it is to know where to go in life and find God's ultimate design for their lives.
Our second experience was about the size and capacity of God's forgiveness. For this experience we invited each student to extend their arms, as though they were on a cross, for about 6 minutes, during which I played the song East to West by Casting Crowns and read facts about the crucifixion. It is an intense experience, many students can't hold their arms out for 6 full minutes, even our most athletic students. But the difficulty of the experience also led to good conversation. In their small groups they also read the story of Runaway Bunny and talked about how God is willing to do anything, even death on a cross, to forgive us and draw close to us.
Our third experience was about the community that God gives us. During this experience I distributed note cards and markers, inviting students to think about their garden friends (thanks Tiger for the good idea). Garden friends are friends that you keep especially close to you. I paraphrased the two stories about Jesus taking Peter, James, and John with him up to the mountain (first for the transfiguration, and second for the garden of Gethsemane prayer), and asked the kids to consider who they would want for those two moments in their own life (the happy and sad). We debriefed for a few minutes in large group also talking about who God would want us to include, and who we've decided to exclude from our garden friends.
We closed everything, as usual with our prayer and praise time. A great evening, pretty intense and deep but with lots of good balance. I did notice that two of our more severely handicapped students had a difficult time participating in the evening. So there's still room to change!
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