Opening Prayer:
Loving God, help us to know what to say, and when to say it. Your words are not just noise, they are guidance, assistance, they are compassionate and generous; so too might also be ours. Amen.
Scripture: Ephesians 4:25-32, Proverbs 11:13
The Message: Once its out of the bag...
An increasing number of our students have been taking it upon themselves to put their feelings before other students feelings. Sadly this has been done in an insensitive way, with painful ramifications. A Christian community is subject to the same laws of human behaviour as any other, but should strive harder than any other to model Christ's love and compassion; and as such should be better at it than others!
To help convey the importance of our words, I had 2 students and 1 staff member have a race - because we race along in our world and in our desire to raise ourselves up, we put others down.
The race consisted of having 3 squirting type food products: mayonaise, tomatoe sauce and toothpaste (I lay down 'tracks' of toilet paper to keep it off the floor. Each contestant had to squirt a line of their product along the 'track' and then sign their name at the end (out of the product). The ensuing mess can look like our unintended or undesirable words.
The punchline is then to have the contestants put the contents back in the container. This is obviously impossible. Words can't be taken back, we cannot turn back time and act in a different way then - we can only try and learn and then teach compassion, remembering that we put our signature on the track, and try to clean up any mess we make on the way.
We then sang a song "Feel" by Robbie Williams, and I put some scripture up and images during the prayers that related to Christs compassion and servant-leadership.
We had a time of a greeting of peace, in which I encouraged students to seek out those they may have hurt, and then we all sang along to "One Way Jesus!"
