The four Advent candles, along with the Christ candle, are lit on the Advent wreath each year at Christmastime. They represent the foundations of faith that Jesus made manifest in the world that night in Bethlehem.
Last week, we talked about Hope, and the hope that Christ brings to the world.
This week, the second week in Advent, we will talk about Peace.
This Sunday in The F.L.Y. Café, we held an open house and invited our congregation to come downstairs after worship, visit our classroom and see what our youth have been up to. Many renovations took place this summer in order to make The F.L.Y. Café a comfortable, fun, interactive and engaging space where teens and college-aged youth could worship and study the word, grow closer to God, grow deeper in faith, and gain a stronger understanding of God's plan and purpose for their lives.
Here are some of the renovations we made:
We prepared a slideshow, got three times as many doughnuts as usual and made about a pound more coffee! We also displayed some of the work that the students have been doing. One of the pieces that was displayed was a contrast piece that depicted, through the students' own interpretation and media (songs, writing, typography, collage, drawing, etc...) the contrast between God's plans and promises for us, an the result of sin in the world. These pieces were created following a series of lessons on the Creation and the Fall, up to and including the Flood and the Abrahamic Covenant. The students also participated in an Awareness Examen activity, in which they were provided silhouetted images of trees and asked to draw the details that were NOT there, in order to focus there attention on the moments in their lives where God is present.
Here are some samples of the students' work:
For this week's lesson, we took a look at Peace, and how in many cases, peace seems an oddly distant feeling around this time of the year. The hectic pace that takes over our lives around the holiday season seem to invade our every move. There also many people around the world who are suffering through hardship, heartbreak, loneliness, and war this time of the year. We discussed the peace that the Lord brings, and how it is different than the peace that the world provides and promises; how God's peace surpasses all understanding and logic.
We participated in an object lesson where the students had to take part in one of the least peaceful activities of the holiday season....untangling Christmas lights! There was a catch, though. Students had to sit in a circle, and place their dominant hands behind their backs, working together as a team with only their non-dominant hands to untangle the balled up mess of lights together. this was to illustrated that working together for "peaceful resolutions" is not always an easy task, and that it takes patience, communication and involvement to work toward a common goal.
We also watched a YouTube video of one of my favorite Christmas songs. The song is "Christmas Lights" by Coldplay. I got this idea from the AMAZING youth resource: Rethinking Youth Ministry.
We watched the video of this rather melancholy Christmas tune about a broken relationship at Christmastime. We discussed how it related to unrest in the world and how the broken relationship in the song could be paralleled to our broken relationship with God, prior to the coming of Christ at Christmas. We discussed the meaning of the end of the song, when hope seems to filter in and what the "Christmas Lights" in the song might symbolize.
At the end of the lesson, the students wrote letters to themselves listing ways that they would plan to contribute to spreading hope, peace, joy and love within their own families, communities and the world in 2014. They were encouraged to place the envelopes in a safe place and open them next Advent to assess how they did with keeping their promises.
We also had the privilege of having the Confirmation students visit our class during Sunday school and take part in our lesson. We were thrilled to be able to offer this opportunity to the Confirmation students in order to show them that there is faith life after Confirmation!!! :-)
We at the F.L.Y. Café want to be an encouragement to the younger youth in the church, and we were glad to be able to host their class for a day!
For those who wish to watch the Coldplay: Christmas Lights video, it is posted below:
Peace be with you.
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