Prayer and Recognizing the Spirit

My partner gets all the credit for this one!

For our most recent activity we discussed prayer and recognizing the Spirit. We began by discussing when to pray and not being repetitive. We also gave the girls a paper titled "Prayer Ideas." They had room to write 15 ideas of things that they could pray for. We encouraged them to think outside the box.

We then talked about how sometimes we can't hear the Spirit, even though we are doing good things. We did a little object lesson that really hit home. Here's how it went:

We told them it was Saturday and that we they preparing for Sunday by playing church music. Using a CD player we played a song quietly for a second. Then we said that their mom asked their little sister to work on her chores so she began vacuuming. We turned a vacuum on and ran it across the floor. We could no longer hear the music so we turned it up above the noise of the vacuum. While all that was going, we then said "your other little sister decides to practice the piano." I started playing and although it was songs from the Children's song book, it was too much noise. My partner tried to get a few of the girls to talk in their normal voices but no one could hear!

Although everything that was going on were good things, when we don't take time to listen and concentrate, we might get lost in the noise of the world.

After discussing that we had one more object lesson in store. We paired the girls off in two with partners that they don't normally hang around with. We said that they had 1 minute to talk to each other, study each others voices and come up with a plan. They were going to have to find each other without saying each others names and without seeing each other.

We then had one girl from each partnership go with me and the other with my partner. We were at the church so we were able to use the High Priest room that has more than one door. She entered in one door with her girls and I went in the other with mine. We had closed the room off with the partition and on the count of three they all started talking and tried finding their partners voice. Some of them used code words, which was pretty clever. One girl hit the nail on the head when she said "it's too hard to hear when everyone is talking."

They loved it! It was fun to see them when we opened the partition and they got to see if the person they were talking to on the other side was actually their partner.

Now, a side note: if you decide to do this object lesson, I would recommend using a sheet or blanket draped from the ceiling. It would be much easier for the girls, but still a challenge.

I hope this makes sense! It was a difficult activity to put into words. Contact me if you need help!