Well, my church finally made it into this century and hooked up broad band internet! We even have a wireless router. How cool is that? Anyway, this lets me type and add stuff from here. It is way, way cool. I doubt that will add any more stuff on this blog just because I have access though so it doesn’t really affect you guys all that much. So I guess I just wasted your time making you read this paragraph. Of course if you are coming here on a regular basis you have too much time on your hand anyway so I guess it is a wash.

Last night’s lesson went well. It felt right. I don’t know if that makes sense to any of you, but it just felt right. I wasn’t perfect, and there were some little annoyances, but it really felt like the message fit the audience in a way that only God could orchestrate.

One cool idea from the lesson that I will share: I actually used Mario Party 6 as a object lesson. So now I have incorporated role-playing and Nintendo into my youth group. If I can find a way to get tuba playing and star trek uniforms involved my journey to the UNYG (pronounced unigy and standing or Ultimate Nerd Youth Group) will be complete.

Anyway, the idea:

I set up Mario Party 6 to just let me play mini-games and chose the game “Odd Card Out” (I think that is the title, it is the one that you have to choose which card isn’t like the others) Before I revealed what was going on I chose 2 groups of 4 volunteers so that we could play 2 rounds. (I didn’t want a mad rush for volunteers so I made them volunteer before I told them they would be playing Nintendo.) They played the game and I gave a prize for the winner in each group.

When they were playing I told the audience to shout out answers (either the right one or the wrong one.) It was hard to pick the right answer when people are shouting out wrong buttons.

Then I talked about choices and about how you had to choose in the game which one was right in the midst of lots of noise. I was talking about how every time you encounter Jesus you have a choice to follow Him or not, but it could easily be modified to be for any “making right choices” type lesson.

I would suggest letting the first group practice as it can be a little hard if you don’t.