Semaphore

Last night at youth group we talked about truth, specifically how do you know that the Bible is true, and what that should mean to us. To begin our evening we played an icebreaker game that I call Jello, then played a game about communication using Semaphores, followed by a short discussion including a few stories from me, and then moved to small groups before closing the evening with campfire worship.

JELLO
During this game one person stands in the middle of the circle and attempts to get out of the circle by walking up to someone in the circle, pointing at them, saying one of the silly words, and then counting to ten as fast as possible. In reaction, the person pointed to, and the person on each side of them, performs an action that matches the word. If the counting person is able to get to ten before the three people are able to complete the action, they can join the circle and the person who failed to correctly do the action takes their place in the middle of the circle. I always begin this game by teaching three actions: Jello, Kamikaze, and Hamburger. Then we play the game until it seems that everyone understands how to play, or if one person is in the middle too long, I will rescue them by taking their place and teaching a new action. We concluded 20 minutes of play, adding in the following signs: Elephant, Hammock, Fire Hydrant, and Cheeseburger.

SEMAPHORES
This game was a game I invented for the evening to begin our conversation about the difficulty of communication. I split our group into teams and then explained that they would be competing against each other to communicate a code from one side of the room to the other. The communication style used would be semaphore (which is the spelling out of letters using flags or arms). So teams were given the Semaphore instructions sheets and were given a few minutes to form a strategy. Then each team sent part of their team to the far side of the room where a basket was filled with slips of paper containing codes to be transmitted. The other part of the team was shown where answers where (pictures of different colored shapes) and were told that they would only get two guesses for each code, if guessed incorrectly twice, their team would have to choose a new code. For some extra fun I decided to make the codes not match the pictures exactly, but require some interpretation, so the code for red square actually said: RED FOUR SIDES. It wasn't terribly confusing, but it definitely required some extra thought. After the kids picked up on the interpretations the code givers started to interpret before sending a code, sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly. One group had decided ahead of time to use abbreviations for all their transmissions and were really lost when the code was "gold" instead of yellow. All of this difficulty worked it's way into our conversation which followed about how we communicate and the difficulty that we have communicating accurately sometimes.

We transitioned into our conversation and I shared a few stories about miscommunication (John's college homework assignment and a story about the telegraph).  Then started talking about how we know that the Bible is true, accurate. This conversation then led into the small groups, framing a deeper discussion about getting the truth out of the Bible rather than being bogged down with the exact words, translations, or how authentic the story might be. The lesson was about reading the Bible for the truth, rather than reading it like a history book.

The small groups each ended with the same conclusion: we should try to read our Bible more.