Monday, November 5, 2012

A Disciplined Walk With God

Set 1 Meeting 5 - A Disciplined Walk With God happened yesterday!

Even with 2 gals missing we had a full house - 9 girls in all...we're so very thankful that the Lord is continuing to answer our prayer for more young ladies to join our Bellevue Bright Lights group.  We have one new official member, and another young lady and her mom (who attended our Radiant Purity conference this past summer) checked out our group to see how one runs because they are thinking about starting up a new group on Vashon Island - so exciting!

Before the teaching, I had the girls calculate how much time they spend each week doing the following things:

1.)  watching TV and / or movies
2.)  computer time (games, email, internet searching, etc,)
3.)  talking with friends (at school, texting, phone, etc.)
4.)  sports (practicing / competing)
5.)  hobbies (interests, pursuits)
6.)  time with God (willingly spending time in prayer, reading the Word, meditating on the Word, memorizing scripture...attending church or other related groups only could count if they could honestly say they paid attention to the messages during those times!)

We took turns reading through a large chunk of the Daily Growth section of their BL notebooks, and then read another portion of Before You Meet Prince Charming (the intro story to chapter 2), and finally broke up into our small groups.  There, they were to fill in blank bar graphs with the information they had recorded about how they spend their time to give them a visual of how much time was (or wasn't) going into growing a relationship with the Lord.  I love my small group leaders - it is helping me so much to have their assistance during the meetings and the younger girls are loving it!  This week I set up an official Worship Leader and the Birthday Committee recognized it's first birthday girl.  For our next meeting, I will be instituting a Hospitality Committe among the younger girls - they'll be in charge of making sure new girls feel very welcome, helping to get the girls to clean up after tea time, and any other simple things to help people feel comfortable at the meetings.  I want to help the girls to envision something more than just showing up and having everything done for them...that they can actually be a blessing to me and the other girls as well!

Our activity this week was to write our first group letters to the New Zealand pen pals.  I just read all the girls' letters this morning and they are amazing!  They each did a great job in hitting the 3 things that were required in the letters:

1.)  Tell something about yourself
2.)  Tell something about Bright Lights
3.)  Tell something that the Lord is talking to you about right now

I was thrilled with some of the answers they wrote - God is moving in these young girls' hearts!

As part of today's lesson, I also sent home a letter to the fathers of the girls asking for their help in suggesting new spiritual discipline goals for their daughters.  I took the sample letter from off of the leaders resource page and tweaked it just a bit:

Dear Fathers,

First of all, I want to say thank you for letting your daughters be a part of our Bellevue Bright Lights group! I value each of them and am enjoying getting to know them more and more as our meetings progress…and of course, a few of them have been in the group since last year and I’m thankful also for their commitment.

This weeks lesson was on: A Disciplined Walk with God. We studied basic Biblical disciplines such as prayer, Bible reading, etc, If you are willing, I have a special (and very quick!) assignment just for you. Since each girl is in a different stage of maturity, I want to be careful what I expect from them. I did not give the girls any particular assignment…instead, I am having them ask their fathers what would be an appropriate goal for them in the area of routine spiritual disciplines. In their notebooks is a list for you to look at. Perhaps for some girls, the goal would be simply reading the Bible 5 minutes each day. For others, it may be stepping things up a bit and actually memorizing a certain amount of scripture each week.

Some girls may already be consistent in the area of spiritual disciplines, but to others it may be totally new. Of course, they do not need to implement all of these disciplines…it is better to start easy and begin setting a pattern. Doing a little regularly is more important than doing a lot all at once and failing.

I don’t want to push the girls unrealistically; on the other hand I don’t want to hold them back if the Lord is challenging them. I think that the girls in Bellevue Bright Lights are the “cream of the crop” and are capable of amazing things.

Many blessings,

Chay Bigger

 

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