Virtual Sunday School week 3:

feelings check-in

Parents: read through the lesson and decide how you want to share with your family. This week’s focus is all about understanding and naming our feelings. (Lesson adapted from Illustrated Children’s Ministry)

Read

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reflect

This morning’s scripture is from the book of Psalms, which is an entire book of songs and prayers written to God. Some of the psalms are really happy, but not all of them. In this song, the writer is deeply upset and looking for comfort and hope by crying out to God.

The psalmist cries out to God from the depths - a place of grief, despair, and deep worry. But as we read on, we can hear how the psalmist has faith things won’t stay that way. The psalmist trusts God will listen to their cries and bring them up from the depths. It won’t be immediate, though. There will be waiting.

Waiting is a hard thing to do. The psalmist tells us while they waited, they used that time to repent. Repentance means changing your mind. It’s letting how you see yourself and the world be transformed. It can involve saying good-bye to old things or old ways of living and being. Like the psalmist who wrote this whole song with hope from the depths of pain, we too are waiting. And while we’re waiting, we’re probably feeling lots of different kinds of emotions.

discuss

  1. What is the hardest thing about waiting?

  2. What do you like to do when you’re really really happy?

  3. What do you do when you’re upset? What makes you feel better?

  4. Who do you talk to when you need to share how you feel?

create

When we talk about compassion, we usually talk about having compassion for other people. But did you know it’s important to have compassion for ourselves too? One act of compassion you can practice this week is naming your emotions. When we name our emotions, we become aware of how a situation is affecting us.

We can practice naming our emotions by creating our own emotion wheel! Click on the image below to download a copy to color, or get creative and come up with your own unique wheel!

Of course, this emotion wheel is simplified. You can get much more in depth like one of these:

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feelings-wheel-color.jpg

Use your emotion wheel to check in with yourself and your family group a few times a day. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling right now?” Remember- there’s no right or wrong answer! No feeling is final; naming and sitting with our feelings throughout the day can help us remember that ‘this too shall pass!’

watch

Some of you may remember when we read the story, I’m Sad in church once. I absolutely love this book when talking about emotions, because it gives us permission to feel our feelings…. even the ones we don’t like very much.

share

If you are part of Beacon Heights, we will have a zoom meeting time together this Friday at 10 a.m.! Look for a link and instructions in your email. If you are part of a different community, I encourage you to coordinate with friends and family to see each other through Face Time, Skype, Zoom, or whatever works best for you!