At Pulse (our youth club) today, in addition to the very cool radio controlled car races, we helped prepare for the prayers at our worship tomorrow. We prepared a large altar frontal with the blue of the sky and a white rainbow which we're going to build up to the full technicolour with heart shaped pieces of paper in the seven colours of the spectrum.
In my talk to the young people I focussed on Tilly Smith, the young ten year old from Surrey, who saved a beachful of people in Thailand because she had learned about Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Geography at school a few weeks before. I wanted the young people to know that they can do things that have an impact on the world. The first thing I asked them to do was to cut out one of these hearts for the prayers tomorrow.
So we gave each of them the a square of paper and got them all to fold the paper in half. Then I asked them all to hold that piece of paper up in the air and be quiet whilst they thought about the people in SE Asia, the people who would use the piece of paperfor prayer the next day. It was then, gradually, that the little miracle occurred. The room went silent. There was a buzz. They really did GET IT. Whether or not they each prayed is irrelevant. They were there and they were in the prayer. I stopped myself from spoiling it all with words. We just moved from there to the place where they could cut the paper into a heart shape.
No comments:
Post a Comment