Sunday Morning Impact

This Sunday was definitely an above average Sunday.
Game: Great
Music: Good
Lesson: Awesome

The game we played was "Towel Ball." We tied up some dish towels in knots. Then the kids got into two big circles and started playing dodge ball. They couldn't catch it, and they could get hit from anybody in either circle. Bobby Rivas won for one circle and Dane won in the other.

Nathan led worship. He did a good job. I was busy setting up for our lesson that I didn't get to listen super close. But the kids seemed to be into it. He did a pretty new song and then two old ones, and the kids always love the old ones.

I wanted our lesson this week to be something different than me standing up there talking to the kids. I wanted it to be interactive. I've had this idea in the back of my head for a little bit, and so I decided to go with it. We had a prayer journey. I set up 6 stations around the youth room for the kids to go to. Each station had a different direction for the kids to pray. They could go through it at their own pace, but I wanted them to concentrate and take every station serious.

The first station had a map of the United States. They basically played "Pin-the-tail-on-America" and where ever they stuck their thumb tack, they needed to pray for that area. Pray that people come to know God. Pray for the homeless. Pray for the unemployed. They prayed for several things in each community. We had a pretty good mix of the nation, from Seattle to Florida up to Boston. We even had a couple in Canada and one in Hawaii.

At the second station, they read Genesis 1:31. They had to see that God had made them, and God saw them as good. They are God's masterpiece. They had to draw a picture of themselves (the best they could anyways) as God sees them.

The third station was about an organization that I really like and support that helps girls come out of sexual slavery in Thailand called Servantworks.
The kids had to read the story of the organization and they read a story of one of the girls, Pontip. Then they prayed for the girls who are there and for the people who work there. Then they wrote a note to the people there as encouragement. I'm going to send the notes to them. Some wrote to the workers, and others wrote to Pontip. This one was my favorite.

At the fourth station, they made a collage. They wrote John 3:16 in the middle of a page, and then made a collage of how God shows love to the world around the verse. Some had pictures of people that God loves. Others had pictures of natural beauty that God created.

At the fifth station, they had to pray for somebody they knew that was hurting. People are hurting all around us. When they thought of somebody, they could make them a card, just letting them know that they were being thought about.

The sixth station was more contemplative. I gave them a few scriptures to read, about how deeply God knows them and desires a relationship with them. Then they took a piece of paper and had to journal out a prayer to God about things that they learned from the scriptures and through the process that they had gone through during the morning.

I gave them almost an hour to do it, and they seemed to take it serious and they seemed to have had a good time going through it. I think they learned a lot, and I think ti was good for them to have some activities while they were learning about prayer and seeing how they can spot different needs to pray for. Every station had a sheet of paper that was pretty detailed about what each station meant, and what they were to pray for. I just kinda summed things up here. Overall, I think it was one of the best Sundays we've had in a long time.