Family Sunday School: Change

This week for Family Sunday School, we’re talking about change.

Young people live in a state of almost constant change – new schools, new grades, new teachers, new skills, new friends. Their bodies change, their interests change, and their actual brains change — all in dramatic ways they have no control over. Right in this season, we as adults have more insight than usual as to what all that change, sudden, scary, and outside of our control, feels like.

Change can be deeply anxiety-inducing: there is something within us that is afraid that we won’t be OK on the other side of whatever change is coming — that we won’t be us, or that the person we are cannot adjust to some new reality. We are short-sighted in that way. We know we’ve navigated a thousand changes before, but uncertainty still scares us.

We’re not the first to feel that way! This week in Family Sunday School, I lift up the words of Psalm 102, where the writer says: “You laid the earth’s foundations long ago; the skies are your handiwork. These things will pass away, but you will last. All of these things will wear out like clothing; you change them like clothes, and they pass on. But you are the one! Your years never end!” (vs. 25-27)

You don’t write words like that except as encouragement — and as a reminder to all of those fears in ourselves and others that say it might not be true. The psalmist, Hebrews, and Leviticus, all repeat this refrain – the Lord does not change, the Lord is forever.

What does that mean for us? That we can be free to change. That we are liberated to step into uncertain futures, to embrace new realities, relationships, places, phases, because no matter where we go or what we do or who we become, God’s steadfast love remains the same. Just as God was present on both sides of every other change in human history, and in every human heart, God is present and unchanging on both sides of whatever change we face as well.

In this time of so much uncertainty and unsteadiness, may we find relief from this one fear, that no matter what changes, God remains.

 

 

Kat Bair
Director of Youth Ministries

Want to download and print this lesson? Click here to download a PDF of Family Sunday School for 5.24.20

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