Tackling heavy topics in our youth groups

Anyone who has prepared a youth or children's programme for a church weekend away will know the feeling: your minister is due to chat to the speaker, and once they have, you will have your theme for the weekend.

We try to teach the youth and children the same thing over the weekend as the adults, so this is a big moment - if the theme is Jonah, you're laughing; Lamentations (as we once had) - less so! So you can imagine how I felt when the theme came through as "learning to groan well," looking at three tricky psalms of lament! My initial thoughts were "no thank you, let's do something completely different," but my fantastic team convinced me to think again.

It is so easy to think that it is only adults who go through hard times, but many of those under 18 in our church family (and I'm sure in yours) have gone through some incredibly difficult things. And for those who haven't particularly, it would be great to prepare them for those moments, so that their reaction is always to run to God in times of darkness, rather than away from Him.

So we decided, instead of looking at those psalms, to look at four incidents from Jesus' life and focus on the emotions involved. How did Jesus meet people in their fear, sadness, despair and anxiety? And how can He transform our emotional experiences just like He did theirs? I worked through these stories with our younger youth and had a good time thinking these things through and trying to encourage them to engage with their emotions.

But it was those leading the toddler and children's groups who really knocked it out of the park. The toddlers learnt a version of "if you're happy and you know it clap your hands," but instead went through the various emotions they could experience, or find hard, and then sung "take it to God" instead. Then the older children started the weekend watching the movie Inside Out, and even did crafts based on the film (including "memory orbs" with their memory verse inside!). But much more significantly they taught the children to know that trusting in Jesus completely transforms their emotions and enables them to run to Him.

So it turns out it is not only possible, but also good to teach our youth and children to groan well and take all their emotions to Jesus.