Sorry for the silence in the blogosphere of late - STILL waiting for my home internet to be fixed... ;(
Thanks to all who prayer for this past weekend’s activities. We had a great time, here are a few highlights:
1. 17 young people watched ‘THE PASSION’ on Friday night. I know that ‘enjoy’ is not the right word to use, but they appreciated seeing the film, many tissues were used, and the discussion afterwards was good. One boy, however, asked if there was anyone else famous in the film apart from Jesus!! I suppose it’s logical, if you believe Jesus is alive, why shouldn’t he star in his own film?!
2. The Creative Prayer Room 'THE SANCTUARY - HOLY SPACE SACRED SPACE' which was what the prayer room was transformed into on Saturday proved very popular with the children. Over the day 35 of the children here (aged from 6 to 16) came in. A couple stayed 3 minutes, some stayed 3 hours. They loved the activities, although one girl is now convinced that if she stirs salt into warm water all her sins will go away, she kept thinking of things she's done wrong, going back, and a lot of salt got put in the water!
3. One of the activities was to write or draw prayers to God. I'll put some of the examples into another post as I don't have them with me, but they were amazing. Some kids wrote over a page of A4 pouring out how much they love God. When you think that some of the backgrounds that these kids have come from (not pretty at all) it's fantastic that they are so free to express their love in this way.
4. Praying for the children was amazing. Prayer is a big thing here and they have no qualms about asking someone to pray for them. It was brilliant to be able to pray over some of these children and to see God working in their lives.
5. The t-lights were another popular section, i've never seen so much wax in my life. They loved lighting the candles and praying for others, a lot prayed for family members. Yet the greater fun was in watching them burn and removing any 'spare' wax... (don't worry, they were being closely supervised!)
6. Sunday was Pentecost and the worship in the morning was great. I think for the first time since I've been running the services, I sensed that the kids were really into worshipping. I even taught them a new song 'Father, we adore you', which I'm sure will be sung again and again. At the end of the service we waited on the Holy Spirit to come and for a few brief seconds there was absolute silence in the room as the kids prayed. That in itself is a miracle, when you realise that we had 6 under fives in there too.
All in all, a BIG success, the kids loved it, the volunteers who helped out loved it and it was such a peaceful place to be. I'll definitely do it again, with different activities, as the Spirit leads.
