Spirituality 101

That is what I called my session with the middle school kids who come to our church every afternoon for snacks and tutoring. The name of the program is "Foundations" and we are very pleased to house it in our church.

They asked me if I would do a session on "Spirituality" for the kids and I said I would. But then, what to do?

So, I put together this thing on spirituality. Starting with asking them to define 5 concepts: spirituality, religion, church, prayer and soul. So, I end up with 4 kids - 2 girls and 2 boys who basically acted like they did not want to be there. One of the girls said she had a headache and acted like this was really stupid. Mostly, they had question marks for all of these questions.

Great start. So, I talked to them and tried to get them to talk about soul - and how friends, family and we ourselves hurt our souls.
This was going to lead into what we can do to heal our souls - silence, music, etc. So, I got some stuff out of them and finally had them go to different pews in the sanctuary and played a song.
The song was from the CD - "Healing the Inner Child" and the words were - "Don't let anyone let you feel anything but beautiful" They listened to it and I asked them what they thought, how they liked it - they said it was good. Everyone said it was "good." Hmmmm. This works better with middle aged women.

Finally I showed them how to breathe in and out and ask for peace and then played some music from a "reiki" CD. For about 5 minutes. They seemed to respond - who knows? It was very
difficult. Especially after the girl who seemed so bored by it all informed me that her Mom did not believe in God.

At the end I talked about how they need to care for their souls and if they ever had questions about anything to come to me.
And as I was putting things away, one of the boys came up to me and told me that he had been in a "different dimension" during the meditation time. He saw his Mom. And his Mom was dead. It turns out his Mom died when he was 2 years old. And I asked how he felt seeing her, he said he felt good. He said that it meant she didn't go to hell. He was afraid she had gone to helll because she died from a drug overdose.

He told me that Terry, one of the tutors, had told him that he didn't believe in hell and that he thought that his Mom was in heaven. And this experienced verified that for him.

I did not know what to make of any of this - except that God is good. Even in the midst of my bumbling around with these kids - something happened here today.