Learning Activities

What’s important, really?
Youth program

Sustaining Simplicity is also the story of a single mother’s parenting of a teen who deals with the question of simplicity in his own life. This outline provides a 90-minute program that answers the questions, “How do you decide what’s important in life, and how do you act on that belief?”  

Outcomes

• Participants sift through competing versions of life’s priorities.
• Participants describe their reactions to a life-changing event.

Biblical bases

Psalm 90; Matthew 16:26; Luke12:32-34

Materials

• Index cards, several per participant, and fine-line markers or pens
  Newsprint and markers

Activities

1. Introduce the program’s general topic, and begin with an autobiographical story about a moment in your life when you shifted life priorities in a major way. (15 minutes)
2. Walk participants through an imagined life-changing experience. They should close their eyes and listen as you unfold one or more of these simulated true-to-life stories: (10-15 minutes)

• Your church’s popular youth worker dies in a boating accident.
• Your father and mother both get new jobs in another part of the country.
• You get hired to spend a summer helping children with terminal cancer.
• Your close friend commits suicide because no one appreciates him or her.
• You are wrongly accused and suspended for one week.
• You fall in love with a person who is very, very religious.

3. Ask participants to use the writing paper to describe their reactions to these stories: What would change in you, down deep? What wouldn’t you ever forget? How would this story change the way you think about what’s important?  (20 minutes)
4. Use the newsprint to record participants’ shared reactions.  (15 minutes)
5. Ask the group for definitions of “What’s important?” and “What’s not important?”   Write their ideas on newsprint. Then talk about the ways in which these priorities compete with each other. (20 minutes)
6. Conclude with a prayer for discernment in the face of life-changing events, no matter their size.  (5 minutes)