Post your Hits
Thanks to Rethinking Youth Ministry and Practical Youth Ministry for the inspiration!
“Post Your Hits”– A good interactive prayer for winding up a session on responding to Hits while on the PATH. Part of our goal is to help teens recognize and rename Hits as a ‘cross.’ Jesus took all sorts of Hits during his ministry (denial, mocking, sarcasm, jealousy), as well as the ultimate hit of his Passion and Crucifixion. Since he’s came to show us how to live fully, we know that Hits and crosses are a realistic part of life. But we can look to him to learn how to respond to and carry them as people on the PATH.
This prayer piece invites participants to build a visual reminder that we all carry crosses, and part of our task as members of the Mystical Body is to share the burden–our own and another’s–as we work to get back to the Garden together.
Make a one dimensional cross, such as the one constructed using blue duct tape. In a retreat setting, the floor will work. In a classroom, try a part of your white board, or a bulletin board, perhaps the back of your classroom door or a window to the outdoors (witnessing that we bear our crosses to the world).
Leave out a supply of markers and Post-It pads. Either distribute or hang the Instructions.
Dim the room lights, light a few candles, bring up “Carry My Cross” by Third Day or Avril Lavigne’s “Keep Holding On“. Ask participants to work through the instructions, write their thoughts down and then place them on the cross.