ARTIST:The Lego Movie 2 cast
SUITABLE FOR: Under-10s
INTRODUCTION
The antidote to the hit earworm ‘Everything is awesome’ from The Lego Movie, this track explores the idea that although we may face challenges and difficulties there is still hope. Today’s session follows the same theme.
You may like to set out some Lego before the session for the children to play with as they arrive. You could set them particular building challenges or encourage free play.
Gather the children together and explain that you are going to play a game. The room represents a scale: one wall represents ‘everything is awesome’ and the opposite wall represents ‘everything’s not awesome’. Tell the group that you are going to share a number of scenarios and that they should move across the room to stand at the place of their choosing along the scale to indicate how they feel about this. Topics could include school, this week, family and Christmas.
When you have run a few of these, explain that there are some things in life that are really awesome, such as Christmas, perhaps. But there are also many things in life that are simply not awesome, and we will be exploring this a bit more today.
LISTEN AND DISCUSS
Play the track, distributing copies of the lyrics if they will be helpful. As a group, discuss the following questions:
- What jumps out to you from this song?
- What can you most relate to?
- Does anything particularly challenge you?
- Is it possible for everything not to be awesome and for us still to have hope, or is all hope gone?
Help the children share their ideas and talk about their experiences of things being ‘not awesome’, yet still OK. Explain that sometimes as Christians we give out a false message that if we choose to give our lives to follow Jesus everything will be awesome, easy, straightforward and painless. That simply isn’t true, and this song is actually a more accurate representation of what it means to follow Jesus.
Look together at 1 Peter 4 in a translation that can be understood by the children, explaining any terms that may be unfamiliar. Ask them what they notice from this reading and what most jumps out for them.
Explain to the children that Peter was writing to the early Chris- tians, who often suffered under the rule of the Romans. Like us, they knew what it meant for life to be ‘not awesome’, but Peter reassures them that there is always hope, just as it says in the song. Like the Christians Peter was first writing to, we need to ‘stick together’ to help each other through.
You could play the track again as you draw the session to a close. Invite the children to take the opportunity to encourage each other to keep going even when things are not awesome, because there is always hope.
