God s Plan for Our Happiness

In Pursuit God s Plan for Our Happiness Life Night Outline Catechism # 302-314 # 1719 # 1950-1960 SCRIPTURE Psalm 1:1-3 John 15:11 John 16:22 Romans 7:22 Key Concepts God desires happiness for all His children. God created each of us so that we can live with Him for eternity. Because of our sin God created law so that we would have a path back to him. Goal The goal of this Life Night is to introduce the semester on morality. This night will also help the teens understand God s desire for our happiness and freedom. The night will challenge the teens to see God s law as a way to help us live in His freedom and not as a hindrance to our freedom. About this night This night marks the beginning of the Morality Semester. God desires that we would live as He created us, free and loving. This night will look at what law means for our lives; law is not something that hinders our freedom, but is rather something that allows us to live as God intended. This night will begin with an icebreaker where each teen will meet other teens with similarities. After the icebreaker there will be a humorous skit that will transition into the teaching. The teaching will focus on God s plan for our lives and what it means to live according to His plan. Each teen will have a chance to discuss the teaching in their small groups that will be divided out by grade. The night will conclude with a time of reflection and prayer that will encourage each teen to bring their lives to God s altar. Parental Notice Welcome to our semester on morality! This will be an exciting semester where we will look not only at the Ten Commandments but also at God s plan for our happiness. Yes, there is sin in this world, but God s law guides us away from sin and challenges us to live according to His plan for our freedom. Spend a few minutes this week discussing with your teen(s) their thoughts on morality. Here are a few questions to get the conversation started: 1. When you think about morality, what comes to mind? 2. Why do you think God put laws into place? 3. To you, what is the difference between Godly happiness and worldly happiness? IN PURSUIT outline 12

Environment The room will be set up like a courtroom; the opening skit will take place in God s Courtroom. Place a judge s bench at the front of the room; you can do this by placing a table on a platform so that it stands higher than the other tables. To the right of the judge s bench, place a chair and microphone for the witness stand. Then, opposite the witness stand, place two more tables, one for the defense and one for the prosecution. Notes Media Suggestions Song: "Lay it Down" by Matt Maher (Empty & Beautiful, EMI) Song: "Enough" by Chris Tomlin (Not To Us, Sparrow) Life Teen Video: "Life Teen Logo Loop" (Life Teen Video Support 14) GATHER 15 Minutes Break 20 Minutes Welcome and Introductions (5 min) The youth minister will welcome everyone to the night and new semester and welcome any teens at Life Night for the first time. He/She may give a brief overview of the semester covering the topic of morality and how we are called to live a moral life. Happiness Ice Breaker (5 min) Each person will be given a piece of paper and a pen. They will be instructed to write down ten things that make them happy (for example: friends, sports, school, dance, etc.). Once all the teens have ten things on their list, they must go around the room and find other people with at least one matching item on their list. When they find one person who matches one item, they are to write that name down next to the item that makes them happy. The goal of this icebreaker is to meet ten new people who have similar items on their list. God s Courtroom Skit (5 min) The skit for this night is set in a courtroom where a man is on trial for breaking a few unconventional laws. The God s Courtroom skit can be found on pages 18 to 19. Proclaim 15 Minutes Small Group Discussion (20 min) Tonight each teen will break into small groups according to their grade. For example, all the 9th graders will meet in one area of the room and from there move into smaller groups, depending on the numbers. Breaking the teens up into grades will give them a chance to meet others their own age they may not know. Begin the small group with prayer and use the following questions to guide the discussion: Why do you think there are laws in our schools, state, country, and world? Do you think all people are accountable to the same law? Where does this law come from? Many people argue that laws restrict our freedom; do you agree or disagree? Why? How can following God s law bring us true and lasting happiness? What brings you true and lasting happiness? Is God a part of what brings you happiness? "In Pursuit" Teaching (15 min) The teaching for this night will introduce the Morality Semester and begin to answer a few basic questions about God's plan for our happiness, Natural Law, and our freedom. The teaching can be found on pages 15 to 17. IN PURSUIT outline 13

Send 25 Minutes Recap of Life Night (5 min) Gather all the teens back together into the sanctuary of the church or chapel or into your gathering space (the space will need an altar in the middle). This will be a time of prayer, so set an appropriate tone by lowering the lights and playing soft background music. As they enter into this time, have the Core Members pass out prayer journals to each teen (prayer journals are available at store.lifeteen.com). This is something that will be given to each teen and can be used throughout the semester. The youth minister will welcome everyone back from small groups, give a recap of the Life Night, and transition into this time of prayer. Journal Prompt (20 min) The Send will begin with several minutes of quiet journaling and reflection for each person to truly converse with God through writing. The youth minister should explain how journaling can be a fruitful prayer activity. He or she will then explain that the teens will begin their journal by reflecting on the following questions: everyone has had a chance to come to the altar, close the night by praying the Hail Mary and Ave Maria. Going Deeper Once a month, offer the teens a holy hour of Eucharistic Adoration. Encourage the teens to bring their journals to use as a prayer tool. Give each teen a copy of the semester schedule including event dates, retreat dates, and how they can get more involved during the semester. Adapting This Life Night Instead of a live skit, have the Core Team create a video. A new semester may bring new Core Members. Have a meet-and-greet before Life Night with teens and their parents. If the budget does not afford each teen a prayer journal, hand out a few sheets of paper instead. Are you happy? Why or why not? Do you believe that God desires your TRUE happiness? God created you free and with free will. Do you use the gift of your freedom to choose God? Why or why not? After the time of journaling and reflection, invite the teens to gather around the altar. The youth minister will lead into the final challenge and prayer: IN PURSUIT outline What makes you truly happy? Where do you feel the freest? God has created each of us to be free. He does not want His children to be bound by sin and broken with sadness. The Lord wants each of us to experience true joy, in this life and the next. Over the next few weeks we are going to break open God s Law and see how He has given us the necessary tools we need to be free and happy. We are going to look at the Commandments and follow this path that He has given us to heaven. Ultimately, He wants us to join Him in heaven, but we cannot do that if we are attached to sin. Are there things in your life that keep you from loving the Lord and allowing yourself to experience the joy He wants for you? If so, this is the time to bring them to the Lord. He wants everything, and tonight is an opportunity to lay it down at his altar. At this time, have a few minutes of silence for the teens to pray. Invite the teens to think of the things that keep them from being truly free and fully happy. After a few minutes of silence, begin some soft music (see Media Suggestions ) and invite the teens to come forward to the altar. At the altar, have Core Members prepared to pray for and with each teen. After 14

In Pursuit teaching He s Got a Plan If you ve been coming to church for a while, you might notice that there are a few phrases and ideas that get repeated a lot during our Christian lives. We hear things like Jesus loves you and Offer it up all the time, but one of the phrases that comes out when we re in times of trouble is, It s okay; God s got a plan. When we hear that God has it all under control, it can often feel like just words. Life is crazy, and full of twists and turns that we don t understand. How can all this be part of what God wants? we ask, And what does God want anyway? The answer to that question is simple enough to fit into two words, but massive enough to take all of our history to explain. God wants our happiness. Wait. God wants me to be happy? If that s true, then why are there so many rules to Christianity? That s a question some of you might be asking, and it s a valid one. It can seem like there are two things being said at once; God desires for us to be happy and joyful, but He also has a list of rules and a way of living that we are told we have to follow. Asking these questions is good: it means we re thinking about our faith and actively exploring what it means in our lives. Many of you may have the same questions right now, so we re going to take time to try to answer some of them. Questions (and Answers) Q: So how can both of those be true? How can we be happy if we aren t free to do whatever we want? A: To answer this question, we first have to take a closer look at two of the words we re using: happiness and freedom. See, God s happiness isn t just a feeling it s a fulfillment. We were made to desire God; from the time of Adam and Eve, our hearts have drawn us close to the Creator of all things. To truly find happiness and more importantly, joy we have to live as people of the Beatitudes; not because they arbitrarily make us happy, but because they keep us close to Christ, who is the source of all happiness. That s the thing to remember: God is where we find peace, love, and joy. All good things come from Him, and the closer we are to His heart, the more joyful our own hearts will be. As you transition into the questions, you can have different Core Members answer each one; this way no one has to have the weight of the whole talk on them and we get different personalities. CCC 27 This is where the idea of freedom comes in. Let s think about freedom in a new way. The world s idea of freedom is a place without limits or boundaries, where being able to choose anything without consequence is the ultimate goal. But how did Christ, the perfect example of how to live, express freedom? He was fully man, but He was also fully God, so couldn t He have done whatever He wanted? Couldn t He have killed His enemies, or skipped out on the cross, or snapped His fingers to skip all the pain of Calvary? Yes; He could have. But Christ showed us that there is freedom in obedience, which sounds like a contradiction. But we are God s children and when are children free to play without worry or strife? When they are being watched over by someone to protect them someone to keep them from running into the street or being picked off by a stranger. That is what God s law is for us. It s not a fence that keeps us from getting into the most fun part of life; it s a guardrail that keeps us from falling over the cliff of sin. Our freedom a gift from God lets us choose the good, lets us choose Christ and others over ourselves. Our freedom lets us offer our lives and ourselves as gift. CCC 1730 CCC 1954 IN PURSUIT teaching 15

The Beatitudes and Commandments which we will be talking about this semester are the keys to living a truly blessed life in Christ. Don t Me Q: But aren t those choices about right and wrong for each person to make? Aren t I taking away freedom from my friends when I tell them what they are doing is wrong and judge them? Matthew 7:1 CCC 2300 Make sure this comes across as Church-positive more than world-negative, or you may end up turning off a few teens A: Okay, let s take a second and talk about the word judging. It seems like one of the biggest sins in the eyes of the world is to judge people; and, in fact, Scripture tells us to not judge, lest we be judged. But judging someone means something very specific. God is our perfect judge; when we die, He will see our lives as a whole and make clear if our lives have lead us to unity with Him. That is what it truly means to judge; to claim to know a person s soul and where they should spend eternity. When we take that role into our own hands, we are doing something we shouldn t. That s not the same as what the world tells us, which is that any time we point out right and wrong, we re judging. But by calling our friends to the same holiness we re trying to reach we aren t condemning them, we re trying to help them along the same path to happiness that we re on. In fact, the Church calls each of us to charitably inform the consciences of those we love. If your friend was going to put her hand on a hot stove, you d warn her, wouldn t you? Because you care about her, you would do everything you could to keep her from being hurt even if she was going to hurt herself. There are times when our friends do things that are wrong that pull them away from God and happiness and if we truly love them, we must do what we can to show them the truth of God. If you have an obvious and a subtle example that fit your group of teens better, use those instead. Let s use two examples. If someone we know were cutting themselves, what would we do? They might think it s right and want to do it, but does that mean we should stand by without saying or doing anything? Is that what it really means to care about them? What about if our friends are looking at pornography? That s something accepted by many people, but it s one of the most damaging things we can to do our souls and our sexuality. When we are fighting so hard to live lives of chastity, how could we really love someone and let them be pulled away from God? Q: I believe in being Catholic, but my friends don t. What gives the Church the right to decide what s right and wrong? How can they impose their morality on the whole world even people who aren t part of the Church? CCC 1954 A: Although we learn about moral law from the Church, it s not actually the Church s law; it is God s law. Over the centuries, God has revealed the path of holiness to His people and His bride (the Church). That law is meant for all mankind; every person ever created was designed for heaven and is a son or daughter of God. Inside all of us, even if we never knew that God existed, is a sense of right and wrong. That is called the Natural Law. God wrote that law on our hearts; we are naturally designed to draw close to Him in the way we live. The ethics and rules the Church teaches are simply a deeper explanation of the virtues of the natural law. IN PURSUIT teaching When people talk about what the Church says in the world, they re often referring to contentious issues like abortion or the death penalty or war. Politicians and professors spend hours debating what we should think about these issues. But each of those issues actually has to do with one simple part of that Natural Law we talked about: life should be protected. Everyone whether they re Catholic or not has human dignity and deserves to be defended. That is a truth of Natural Law, and the Church has discovered many ways to apply it in our daily lives. 16

There are a lot of misconceptions about what the Church actually teaches...and that s what we re going to tackle this semester. We ll find out what is in our Church s teachings, and also take a look at how the Commandments are actually guideposts to our own happiness. Q: I love God and I m trying to follow Him so if I m being a good person, why do I need all these rules? Why can t I make up my own mind and find out what seems right or wrong? A: That s a good question actually, the Church says we do need to discover what s right and wrong. But that doesn t mean that we just start picking things willy-nilly; that Natural Law we talked about shows us there actually are things that are specifically right and wrong. If I feel or decide that murder s okay, that doesn t mean it s okay for me to do it s still wrong. The way we can discover what is truly right or wrong is by correctly forming our conscience. As we shape and mold our consciences, we have to seek two virtues in our lives. The first is humility; it takes humility to admit that we don t (and can t) know everything, and that God might have a little better idea of how the world works than we do. The second virtue is trust; we trust in Christ when He established his Church, telling Peter that the gates of Hell would never prevail against it. This is a moment where a good personal testimony about discovering and falling in love with a specific Church teaching can go miles for you. Matthew 16:18 Where Do We Go From Here? Forming our consciences, learning what the Church teaches, and learning how God loves us even through what can seem like rules : these are the things we ll be tackling this semester. Get excited guys, because we re about to find out the key to what so many people want in life: true happiness. IN PURSUIT teaching 17

In PUrsuit skit God's Courtroom Characters: God (aka The ) Bailiff Defendant being accused of the crimes Defense attorney (D.A.) Prosecution attorney (P.A.) Transition into Court Room skit by having a bailiff come into the room and announce: Please rise. Will the Holy, God Himself, enter the courtroom? Everyone stands. Be seated. Okay so what do we have here? It looks as if we have a law-breaker. D.A. My client would like to plead not guilty on all charges. He is an upstanding citizen, Your Honor. P.A. Your Honor, this man was found with a donkey in his bathtub. It is clear that the state bans all donkeys from being in bathtubs, just like in Johnson v. Marshall. I know what the law says. Well sir (turning to the defendant), what do you have to say for yourself? Defendant Your Honor, that was not my donkey or my home. I was house-sitting, and when I got there the donkey was already in the bathtub. Someone is trying to frame me! IN PURSUIT skit P.A. Your Honor, there is more: on the morning of July 8 th, a Sunday, this man was also found carrying an ice cream cone in his back pocket. And most people, unless you live under a rock, know that it is illegal to carry an ice cream cone in their back pocket on Sunday. We believe he should serve the maximum sentence for this charge. Wow, this is serious. 18

Defendant But, Your Honor! (Yelling) Counselor, control your client! D.A. Sorry Your Honor, there will be no more outbursts, but frankly, this is ridiculous. My client was found at 12:30 am on the morning of July 8th. We are talking about 30 minutes. That hardly deserves the maximum sentence. P.A. Yes, one more offense, and this is certainly the most serious this man was found wearing a strapless gown in a public place. Is this true? Were you in public wearing a strapless garment? This is serious! D.A. Your Honor, he was leaving a private costume party on his way home. Please, Your Honor, my client is a boy scout, a volunteer fire fighter, and a family man. He is not a lawbreaker! Can we just dismiss these silly charges and all go home? I would like to go home, actually, but these are laws and we need to enforce the law. If we do not, then what is the point in having laws? Sir, do you have any final words you would like to share before I make my ruling? Defendant Yes sir, I understand that there are consequences to our actions, but please, I beg for your mercy! These laws don t help anyone! I m not even sure what I did wrong! Please have mercy on me! Pause Okay, I have made my decision. With all the authority given unto me in both heaven and earth, I hereby find Mr. not guilty on all accounts. But I hope you have learned your lesson: be careful who you house sit for, check your pockets before sitting down, and avoid bad costume parties. Court is adjourned! (Slams gavel.) IN PURSUIT skit 19

In pursuit checklist Core Planning Team: Date of Life Night: Two Weeks Prior to Life Night: Turn in a detailed outline of the Life Night to the youth minister. Allow the youth minister to give feedback and make any necessary changes. Create a list of needed supplies and materials. Assign a person to be responsible for collecting and/or purchasing the materials needed. Decide the people that will be doing the following things. Make sure they have a copy of the script and/or teaching outline. Inform them of any practices and/or deadlines. Teaching One month prior to the Night: Give copies of the Life Night to each of the members of the planning team. Each person should read the Scripture and Catechism references as well as review the planning guide before the brainstorming meeting. Get the planning team together for a brainstorming meeting (this should last no longer than 1 hour). The team prays and discusses where the teens are in their faith journey in relation to this topic. Then using this planning guide as a starting point, the team adapts the Life Night to meet the needs of the teens and the parish. Create a detailed outline with any changes and/or adjustments. Assign the person responsible for each part of the Life Night: Environment Happiness Ice Breaker God s Courtroom Skit Small Group Discussion Journal Prompt and Prayer Week of the Life Night: Written outline of the teaching is given to the youth minister and practiced. Run a dress rehearsal of the Life Night. Youth minister gives feedback. Create environment and collect needed supplies. E-mail entire Core Team an overview of the night and small group questions. Day of the Life Night: Set up the environment. Make sure the room is clean and presentable. Set up audio and video. Test the video clips to make sure both picture and sound work. Walk the entire Core team through the Life Night. Make sure all transitions are ready and everyone knows their roles. Pray! Pray for the teens attending the Night. Pray for God's will to be done through the night. Pray over those involved. IN PURSUIT checklist Notes 20