March F@CT

 

Hi everyone and welcome to F@CT Online. We are so glad that you can join us here as we have fun together learning more about God. 

We love to sing and dance at F@CT so let's start with one of our favourite songs. You can join in with the actions and singing as we praise God. We can always trust Him to lead us through troubled times as He is our Lighthouse. 

We've got a special visitor to F@CT today and she is called Barbara. She hasn't been to F@CT before but she has heard lots of good things about it. She spoke to Emy over Zoom to find out more.

Thanks Barbara and Emy. That helped us understand a bit more about Lent. 

(Emy would like to point out that she only gave up television for Lent and that she does still watch it. She particularly enjoys watching The Deep on CBBC.)

Lent is a time when God is inviting us to get closer to him. When you hear about people giving something up for Lent or trying something new, that is the reason. Sometimes there might be things that are getting in the way of getting closer to God.

 

We have a story to watch together about someone who was excited to hear about Jesus coming to visit and Jesus invited him to come and meet with him. The surprising thing about this story is the person who Jesus was inviting. He had lots of things in his life which could have stopped him getting close to God. His name was Zacchaeus.

What a great story and it's a fantastic story to hear in Lent. Jesus is inviting EVERYONE to come and meet with him at Easter and to hear the good news of Easter day. He knows when we get things wrong but he loves us anyway and he wants us to say sorry so nothing will get in the way of our relationship with our amazing Father God. 

Activity

We love getting creative at F@CT to help us remember a story so today we are going to be making climbing characters, just like Zacchaeus climbing a tree in today's story.

You can find out how to make your own climbing character here. Maybe you can make a Zacchaeus to climb or maybe you could draw yourself and imagine you were there, climbing the tree to try to see Jesus.

Prayer

Today we are going to have a go at making our own prayer station. A prayer station is an activity or a collection of objects that help us to think about our prayers. 

We can make a Lego prayer station. This a great idea from the Flame:Creative blog. If you don't have little Lego, you could use Duplo or Playmobil or you could draw a prayer station.

Start by making a cross shape on the base to help us remember we are bringing our prayers to Jesus.

Now you can use your Lego to pray. You could use different colour bricks to represent different things you would like to pray for. You could build bricks together to represent a family or a group.  You can use figures and accessories too, such as trees and flowers for prayers for the environment.

When you have assembled your prayer station, take some time to be still and talk to God about the things you have on the board.

We've heard how awesome God is and so we're going to praise God together again with this brilliant song. Here are some cheeky pandas to help us sing it...

Thanks for joining us to celebrate F@CT together today. We hope you have a great week and at Christchurch we are praying for all of  you who are going back to school (or continuing going to school but with lots more friends). 

Please pop back next week as we continue to follow the adventures of the Israelites as they make their way towards the Promised Land.