Friday, March 12, 2010

FORGIVENESS in Upstreet

Forgiveness is a big deal. But kids don't really get it. Forgiveness is completely against our nature. Many adults don't really get it either!

But at Ridge we desperately WANT kids to live out forgiveness just like Jesus did. And we want to partner with their parents to help them get it!

(Here's a pic of the 3rd grade small group with their "playdough" forgiveness poster)

well, i hope they got it. We talked the whole month of February about Forgiveness. When we forgive it's really showing others what God is like because Jesus is the ultimate example of forgiveness. When we forgive others it's really a beautiful picture of the gospel!

All month long we talked about buckets too. When we DON'T forgive it's like we're carrying around grudges in buckets that weigh us down, slow us down, and stop us from enjoying life. We've gotta forgive and just dump those buckets so we can move on.

*So, we tried to partner with parents by sending a bucket home with every child in Upstreet. We told kids that every time someone wronged them and they wanted to forgive that person - just to write it down, ball up the piece of paper & throw it in the bucket.
Then we encouraged parents to talk about all of that stuff and forgivness each week with their children!
Then the kids brought their buckets full of "wrongs" back to Upstreet each week and to symbolize forgiveness in a powerful way they all dumped all the paper in an old wheelbarrow to be taken to the dump!

Forgiveness is a big deal. The world would be a different place if followers of Jesus forgave like we have been forgiven.

I pray that we sparked that kind of lifestyle in this next generation of kids so that the world will be very different in 20 years!

1 comment:

dubbe said...

what a fun and creative way to teach/learn forgiveness! I read once how one can learn forgiveness "visually" by writing down all the things where people have wronged us, then have a burning ceremony to symbolize our forgiveness. I can't remember where I read that though.