youth group – Aspirational Adventures

No connection to the post but a cute picture of my dog taken Saturday 13th April 2024 exploring the storm swept beach close to our house

I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel
Genesis 3:15

I have been a follower of Jesus for 32 years now and I’ve never understood this verse until Sunday night a youth group. I’d sort of knowing it was Jesus crushing the serpent’s head and brutally destroying sin – though of course the brutal bit hadn’t occurred to me until Sunday night.

I might be telling you something you already know but if I am humour me. For me this was an awesomely exciting moment.

My lovely vicar friend pointed out to me, as I openly struggled with this verse and slowly gained realisation, that Jesus’s heel was bruised by mankind’s sin which of course the serpent represents here.

I’d often wondered if it had been the serpent/sin having a nip at Jesus as he was on the cross which is why he said some of the things he said. But know it was my sin, your sin, the world’s sin, that was causing the bruising to Jesus. And … now here’s the really exciting bit that I knew anyway …. Jesus took all that sin – mine, yours, the worlds – all those bits where we had missed God’s mark, gone our own way, done hurtful things to others and ourselves. He had taken that. But he was hurt by it.

It was not a blase-this-is-my-role sort of thing. And it wasn’t just the nails and the beatings etc that hurt. It was taking those things that came in through the serpent, thought the deceiver, that have then caused our world to be filled with wars and pollution and greed and selfishness and fear and [add your own because there are so many more]

So Sunday night I went from “that’s an odd verse and I don’t get it” to “oh my I can understand now why we need to memorise this verse”. The Six Beats One Story even suggests the young people colour in the verse to help them remember. Well now I can understand why they suggest that.

And again Sunday’s youth group just showed me that the Bible always has new things to reveal to us!

Just Do It

Blurred picture of a white egret in flight over Conwy Beach as the tide recedes on spring day. Photographed by Diane Woodrow — Egret flying over Conwy Beach Saturday 18th March 2023 Photographed by myself

Last Sunday I was leading the discussion for our Church youth group. We are working our way through The Lord’s Prayer. [If you go back through some of my posts you will see I am a bit “into” the Lord’s Prayer] This week’s couplet was “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

As always the young people are much less religious than adults and have reach a point of trust with me and my co-worker so they aren’t saying what they think we want them to say. There were some great things that came out of them about the closeness of God’s kingdom and the ease of doing God’s will.

I will paraphrase one girl but it was the bit that stayed with me. She said something along the lines of “God’s will being about trust and if we trust God then we can just do it, just go out and believe that God will make what we do God’s will.” Basically trust that what we feel in our hearts is God’s will. Too often we get into weighing up and judging and then disbelieving, sitting back, not doing.

Of course there are things we should not do, things we should run by those we love and trust – and that means we do need people in our lives that we can be open with and trust with our dreams, our desires, our hopes. So I suppose firstly we need to build up those people around us.

But at the same time as doing that we need to build up the trust in our own hearts. I am getting more and more to a point where I trust my heart and am aware when I’m not “feeling it”.

With these words of this wise thirteen year old girl in my head and a feeling in my heart that I had a space that needed filling in my day I went on Indeed to job hunt. I wasn’t overly serious because I had set myself quite firm criteria – children/young people and afternoons. Well up popped an job in an after-schools club in my town. I scrolled on past but couldn’t get it out of my head so in the end applied. I’ve got the job. I start next week. But when I was at the trial afternoon I felt my heart settle for being there, felt that it was a safe place that I was going to for the right reasons.

Then yesterday I was telling the vicar I co-run the youth group about the job and about how much this girl’s words had impacted me and I realised that this job was totally of God. It stops me from taking on too many things because I will be tied to work every afternoon but also if I want to write I won’t be able to do much during the day. I do have a couple of commitments but that is ok too.

So I did trust my heart, trust that my heart was hearing God/the Universe’s will for my life and I “just did it” and then it appears that I was given a reassurance that I had done right.

So yes it will be tough fitting everything I want to do in to my morning, and will be odd being committed every afternoon and only have weekends and holidays to roam randomly. But that doesn’t mean it is wrong to do. In fact it all feels very right.

Sometimes we do just have to trust and do it