Week 9: Jeremiah Part 2

We started off Sunday night playing a game called "sticker wars".  This entails each person getting 5 stickers.  You have 3 minutes to place all of your stickers on other people, and you can take stickers off of yourself and re-place them on others.  Whoever has the least amount of stickers on them after 3 minutes wins.  Soon after starting, you realize that this game is difficult to win.  You make a little progress and feel like you're finally winning, and then you end up right back where you started.  It seems like no mater how hard you work, you just can't seem to get ahead. 

That's what life was like for Jeremiah.  For more than 40 years, Jeremiah was a prophet in Judah.  During those 40 years, Jeremiah preached the same message to the same people, and he got the same responses over and over again, "Why don't you just leave us alone?"  But, Jeremiah had persistence and continued to deliver God's message even when it seemed like he wasn't making any progress. 

To continue our discussion about persistence and Jeremiah, we watched a clip from the movie Rudy.  Rudy faced a lot of set backs along his journey toward his dream of playing football for Notre Dame.  We see in the clip, that Rudy has finally made it into Notre Dame and is on the football practice team.  It's the last home game of his senior year and it looks as if he is not going to be able to play (after having been told he will).  But then his teammates and eventually the entire crowd starts chanting his name.  The coach agrees to let him play and Notre Dame wins the game!  Rudy had patience, commitment and persistence to keep working toward his dream even when he kept getting pushed back.  Imagine, though, if after all that work Rudy was told he couldn't play.  The frustration and discouragement would have been overwhelming. 

We split into middle and high school groups and looked at areas in our lives where we are persistent and persevere, and areas where we may not be as persistent (things like loving God, loving others, being honest when we pray, etc.).  We talked about how Christians are supposed to be persistent, and ways we can prepare ourselves to be more persistent Christians.  We thought of things in school and society that make persistence difficult, and situations where we are most likely to be persistent in our faith.  Then we took a look at the various areas in our lives which we rated ourselves on and chose one thing on that list that we are going to work on being more persistent with this week.

We spent the rest of the evening playing a game called "Gorgon" which was a big hit.  Think of it as a mix between hide and seek, freeze tag and a scavenger hunt. We hope you will join us next week at FUSION Gathering!