Sweet Frog & Fellowship

This summer we are meeting at Sweet Frog on Tuesdays at 2pm for some fro-yo, fellowship and a short Bible study!  It's a great way to stay connected with friends during the summer, and gives us something to do during the day while the youth are home from school.

Yesterday was our first meeting, and we began our study on 2 Timothy!  We will be looking at the ways that Paul still speaks to us like he did to Timothy in these letters.  Yesterday we talked about Paul's support and encouragement of Timothy to remain faithful even when times are tough.  Who encourages and supports you when you are having a difficult time?  Comment on this post with your responses!

Hope to see you next Tuesday at 2pm at Sweet Frog!  By the way, for those of you who don't know, Sweet Frog is a Christian business!  FROG stands for "Fully Rely On God"!  How cool is that?

How to Forgive

This Sunday was our last FUSION Gathering meeting until school starts back in August!  Crazy how time flies so quickly.

This Sunday was all about forgiveness.  Forgiveness is difficult!  Sometimes, it even seems impossible.  But, God calls us to forgive and Jesus often teaches on forgiveness throughout Scripture.  When we look at Luke 17:1-4, we see a few important things about forgiveness.  First, we see that sin (unfortunately) is a part of life.  God asks us to try to stay away from sinning, but inevitably we mess up sometimes.  We also see in this passage in Luke that when someone sins against us, we are supposed to rebuke them!  Call your friend or family member out on what they have done, because sometimes we hurt someone without even realizing it.  Now this doesn't mean you have to yell at the person or be disrespectful.  It simply means you need to let that person know that you are hurt by what they did.  Next we learn that after making the sin known, we hope and pray for repentance...that the person will understand and feel sorry for what they have done.  And with that repentance comes forgiveness.  And we learn here in Luke that no matter how many times someone sins against us...no matter how much we get frustrated...God calls us to forgive that person every time!

In response we each thought of someone we need to forgive.  We took a piece of yarn and tied it around our wrists like a bracelet.  Knowing that sometimes it can take a while to forgive someone, we are each challenged to keep that bracelet on until we are able to fully forgive that person.  Who is it you need to forgive?  Comment on this post with your responses.

How to Resolve Conflict

This week we took a look at how we can resolve conflict in healthy ways.  We started with looking at a video in which a guy and a girl deal with conflict in various unhealthy ways...explosion, transference, breakdown, internalization, etc.  These are all things we've done before when dealing with conflict.  Obviously conflict can't always be avoided.  But when it does arise, we need a plan for handling it in appropriate ways.

As an initial guideline, we took a look at Acts 6:1-7 where the early church was having issues with some of it's members getting left out in the distribution of resources.  In this story, we see that the Disciples took the time to first identify the issue or conflict at hand.  Then they spent time assessing the priorities at hand. The Disciples knew that this conflict needed to be resolved, but they also knew that their current priorities were to pray and perform the ministry of God's word.  So that brought them to the next step of figuring out the solution and acting on it.  Here they decided the best solution would be to appoint seven people who were wise and strong in their faith to be the sort of mediators to help fix the conflict at hand within the church.  That way the Disciples were able to continue their ministry, but the conflict was being taken care of appropriately and by people the church respected and would listen to.

This story from Acts helps us get a handle on the steps we need to take when conflict arises.  Together we also took a look at several tips for resolving conflict in our own lives.  We learned things like making sure we confront conflicts as soon as possible and stick to the subject at hand rather than trying to bring other situations into the argument to try to "win" our case.  We should confront people privately and make sure to express real feelings while demonstrating unconditional love.  We should seek to understand the other person which involves listening, not just talking.  We should be specific and avoid generalizations, and we should confront to heal, not to win!  It's possible that a conflict may end in the two parties agreeing to disagree like Paul and Barnabas when they argued with each other over the next step in their missionary journey (Acts 15:36-41).  That is okay!  What is important is how we treat each other in the midst of conflict and trying to resolve it.  How do you tend to react in situations of conflict?  Try to remember these tips this week and focus on ways you can handle conflict in healthy and appropriate ways that are pleasing to God!

After our conversation we played our favorite game, Gorgon!  Don't forget NEXT SUNDAY we will have a movie night as we watch "Wesley: A Heart Transformed Can Change the World".  Plan to stay until 8pm rather than our regular 7:30pm ending time.  We will have pizza, veggies and dessert!

 

How to Express Anger

We know that there are ways for us to prevent anger...especially by being quick to listen and slow to speak.  But, there will always be times when we get angry.  AND there are appropriate ways for us to express that anger that can be healthy rather than destructive.

We took a look at Ephesians 4:25-28, Matthew 5:23-26 and Matthew 21:12-13.  In these passages we discovered three characteristics of healthy anger:  Healthy anger is rooted in truth, not falsehood.  Healthy anger seeks resolution, not dominance.  Healthy anger focuses on giving, not taking.  We took a little quiz to evaluate our own anger and found that some of us are stuffers who are afraid to hurt other's feelings and therefore end up hurting ourselves by keeping in all our emotions and need to work on expressing our feelings appropriately.  Some of us are exploders who handle anger spontaneously and aggressively and need to work on finding more constructive ways to handle our anger.  And some of us are manipulators who want to get revenge but do so passively and need to work on face to face problem solving skills.  When you evaluate your anger, what category do you fall in?  Take time this week to really look at how you deal with anger and work on ways to do so more constructively!

After our discussion, we spent time in mission tracing and cutting out teddy bear patterns for Operation Christmas Child!

Encounter: Meeting God face-to-face

We began a new series Sunday night!  For a few weeks we will be looking at anger and conflict and how God calls us to respond.  Sunday we took a look at how we can work to prevent anger.  We started with talking about things that make us angry and completed dovetail puzzles where two words are hidden inside each other.  One word in the puzzle is something that may cause anger and the other word is a way that anger may be expressed...for example: SYPELOLIRNTSG would be Sports and Yelling!  After talking about the individual words and why they make us angry we took a look at several passages in James.  After reading James 1:19-21, 3:3-12 and 4:1-4, 7-10, we see that God calls us to be QUICK to listen, SLOW to speak and SLOW to anger.  When we take the time to listen to God and listen to one another, we often are able to understand the situation we are in better and prevent ourselves from getting angry.  How do you deal with anger?  Comment on this post with your response.

After our discussion, we were able to go outside and play "kick the can" since the weather has been so nice!  I hope to see you next Sunday as we look at how we can express our anger.

Mission & Game Night

We had a blast Sunday night stuffing the Easter eggs for the children's Easter egg hunt (which will take place Easter Sunday morning) and playing our favorite game, gorgon!  Check it out:

Don't forget this Sunday, April 1st, we will NOT have our regular FUSION Gathering meeting at 6pm.  Instead we will be going to the movies to see Mirror Mirror.  I will let you know what time as soon as Sunchase posts the movie times.  Expect it to be somewhere around 4pm, though!

The Messiah as Lion and Lamb

If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?

This is the question we started out with on Sunday night before playing a game of speed charades (you only have 30 seconds to get your team to guess correctly) of all animal clues.

In this series we've talked about Jesus as high priest, king, servant, Son of God, Lord, savior, life, redeemer and now we finish the series talking about Jesus as lion and lamb!  To focus on this understanding of Jesus, we looked at Revelation.  Revelation often gets a bad reputation in a lot of Christian writing and understanding.  I bet I can count on one hand the number of you who read this who have heard a sermon from Revelation.  When we look further though, Revelation is a letter written to seven Christian communities who were under severe persecution.  The reason so many people shy away from Revelation is that it uses a lot of imagery-based writing where symbols and visuals are used to represent other things.  Since it is not literal, the writings in Revelation often confuse people and just seem weird and even scary at times.  Ultimately, though, one of the biggest themes of Revelation is worship, not "the end times".

For our lesson on Sunday night, we looked specifically at Revelation 5:1-8 where Jesus is named both the lion and the lamb.  When we think of a lion, we think of Jesus as things like king, courageous, a leader, brave, powerful and mighty.  When we think of a lamb, we think of Jesus as being meek, peaceful, and a creature killed in sacrifice for sins.  So while lions and lambs are incredibly different, both pinpoint important characteristics of who Jesus is!

Since we are in the season of Lent, we looked at the clip from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" where Aslan is killed and resurrected.  We talked about the parallels of this movie to the Gospel story of Jesus' death and resurrection.  It's amazing the similarities that are present between the two stories, and what better way to understand Jesus as lion than to have him portrayed as an actual lion in this movie!

We took a look at a few photomosaics where artists have created one big picture from lots of smaller ones.  This is a good example of what this series has been like for us.  We looked at lots of different names, understandings, and characteristics of Jesus that together created the bigger picture of who Jesus is.  What a great series to explore, especially during Lent as we prepare our hearts for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Next week we will have a mission and games night!!  So you won't want to miss it, and bring a friend along with you!