TOPIC
Students will reflect on why the Spirit needs to incarnate. What is the purpose of our lives?
OBJECTIVE
At the end of this lesson Youth will have learned:
Cognition: God has a plan for us, and if you don’t look at a higher purpose, you may feel God is unfair. No matter where we are, God’s plan is for us to reach true happiness.
Feeling: satisfaction, general contentment, calmness
OPENING:
Opening prayer and short round kids tell about their week
LAUNCH LESSON
Game: This game can be played with older kids if you have a mixed-age class. This is the same launch lesson plan described in https://vibrantsouls.sssandiego.org/2022/06/07/spirit-purpose-why-are-we-here-part-1/
Draw two lines on the floor, a start line, and a finish line, around 15 – 20ft apart. Tell students whoever gets to the finish line first wins.
Distribute a life story for each student. Suggestion: Adapt these stories according to your class so that it does not expose any child in particular, so that you are not “picking” anyone.
Life stories example: WhyAreWeHere-LifeStories.docx
Ask students to line up in the starting line and give different life stories to each one of them
- Whoever went to elementary school, walk one step forward
- Whoever went to high school, move one step forward
- Whoever has a college degree, move one step forward
- Whoever traveled to at least 1 foreign country, move one step forward
- Whoever is healthy move 1 step forward
- Whoever is beautiful move 1 step forward
- Whoever is a millionaire move one step forwardNow let’s start the race and whoever reaches the final line first, wins!
You expect students to complain that it is NOT FAIR! If not, ask students if the game was fair.
The game is not fair because apparently, you did not have choices in many of these steps. Either you could not study, or you did not have money to travel and know new places, or you were born with a certain condition that made it more difficult for you to do certain things.
Or you did not win the lottery! So, if God is just, why aren’t we born exactly the same way?
If time permits, then play Game of Perspective
EXPLORE LESSON:
Let’s talk about why we incarnate. Why God gives us a body? And why our lives seem to be so different at times?
Why do we need to be here?
In the Spirit’s book, the Spirits explain to us that we: It is an opportunity to learn in LOVE and KNOWLEDGE!
We reincarnate to learn, to cooperate with God’s work, to acquire knowledge we lack of, progress and learn from and fix our past mistakes
And that all spirits are created the same way, simple and ignorant. But because of our choices, we need different experiences while incarnated. We will be born in different bodies and places and conditions because it needs to learn different lessons.
IN THE WHITEBOARD WRITE THIS EXAMPLE or Distribute in a piece of paper so that students can glue in their notebooks:
Once upon a time, there was an extremely wealthy man. He had so much money that he did not need to work for the rest of his life. He decided to spend all his money on video games, food, traveling, cars, yachts, and gold. One day, his friend asked him for money to buy a very expensive medicine, but he refused to lend money or help his friend. In his mind, his friend was too lazy and needed to work harder to get the medicine. Besides, he could lend money from a bank.
In your opinion, what did this man lack?
1)_______________________
2)_______________________
3)_______________________
Next lifetime, he might reincarnate in which conditions so that he can learn what he missed in his last incarnation?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
CONCLUSION:
Today we discussed “The purpose of our lives”
And learned that “God has a plan for us! We must look at our lives as opportunities to draw us closer to God.
We have different lives because we had and have different choices, and if we are seeing differences we don’t understand, that is probably because we are looking “too close” (this is alluding to the game of perspective). We incarnate to learn how to grow in love and knowledge!”