Wow, it has been a while since I last posted. I don’t want to make excuses, but my life has been moving full steam ahead since I moved back home. In the time since my last post, I have taken the kids to the circus, moved into my own apartment, and started my full time lifeguard position at the pool. I feel very blessed to have so many wonderful things going on in my life right now. I am very busy, but I’d take busy over bored any day. And I tell you, with all the kids in the youth group to keep track of, I am rarely bored!
The last lesson I gave, I invited the younger kids to join my class. So, I had a range from elementary kids up to high school kids in one room. It was interesting to say the least. While they were doing a written activity, I had to keep the older kids focused and tell the younger kids how to spell certain words. I suppose I didn’t really take into consideration that they were on very different levels. My mistake. Though, I modified my lesson a bit to accommodate the younger ones and it ended up being really fun! My lesson was about choices. The written activity I began with, involved the personal experiences of everyone in the room. I gave everyone, including myself, two slips of blank paper and a pencil. On one, we all wrote a good choice we recently made and on the other, a bad choice we recently made. Then, we tossed them into a basket and I read them all aloud. Surprisingly, they were all relatively the same. Most of the bad choices were about not listening to parents, lashing out at siblings, and calling people names. A lot of the good choices were about helping with chores. So, we all could relate to those. For my bad choice, I put in something I did when I was younger; back when Vandalia had a movie theater. When I was little, I went to the movies with my friends and I didn’t take any money because I thought that my friend’s mom was going to take care of it. Well, I was wrong and I snuck into the movie without paying for it. When I told everybody this, I had their undivided attention. They could hardly believe that I would do such a thing! It was pretty funny. So, we discussed our choices for a while and talked about what could have been done differently.
Mark
“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
We read this passage and talked about how spiritually, we want to be good and do the right thing, but our human nature is very gullible and falls easily into temptations to make bad choices. We also talked about how many people don’t want to be Christians because we seem to have this big, long list of “rules” that we need to follow to get into Heaven. No drinking. No drugs. No stealing. No swearing. No sex (I cut that out for the sake of younger ears). To many people, it seems that we Christians just aren’t allowed to have any fun. So, we talked about how He doesn’t set rules for us, but he does set guidelines for us to follow. The above examples can have negative consequences. We get hurt when we drink and drive. We hurt others when we cuss at them. Etc. The thing is, that God loves us and wants us to make good choices because He wants us to be happy! He wants us to live a wonderful life feeling loved and loving others. Making bad choices tends to prevent us from doing that. So, we talked about how we all have made mistakes and that it is never too late to make a good choice to correct a bad one.
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