Ready to use music – This Is Real

ARTIST: Jax Jones and Ella Henderson

SUITABLE FOR: 10 to 13s 

INTRODUCTION 

This high-energy track, and session, explores what it means to belong, to be ‘home’. Our young people will have many different experiences of being ‘home’ and this session will need to be  sensitive to the different backgrounds and experiences of our young people, while sharing the ultimate ‘home’ that God can give us all. 

As you begin the session, you could either start with a discussion about what ‘home’ may mean to us, or what it means to belong. Or if it is more suitable, you could begin with a more creative activity – providing cardboard boxes, catalogues and a selection of craft materials and inviting the young people to create a junk-modelled ‘ideal bedroom’ in pairs or small groups. 

Introduce the theme for the session, explaining that we will be thinking about what it means to belong. 

LISTEN AND DISCUSS 

Play the track, distributing copies of the lyrics if you think it would be helpful. After listening to the track, discuss the following questions: 

• What lyrics stand out most to you and why? 
• What does the singer mean that they “have found somewhere that I belong”? 
• When or where might you most feel like that? 

Help the young people to share their ideas, being open to all young people’s suggestions and experiences. Explain that this song may well be about a relationship with another human being, but there are other ways we can look at these lyrics too. 

Distribute Bibles and invite the young people to look at Psalm 84. (The Message version of this passage is a lovely piece of creative rewriting which may be more easily relatable to the young people; you may prefer to print out copies of this paraphrase instead.) Read the passage together and invite the young people to highlight words or phrases which stand out to them. Give the young people the opportunity to raise any questions or explore phrases which are more difficult to understand. 

Together with the young people, discuss the following questions: 

• How does this psalm mirror the song? 
• What does this psalm mean to you? Can you relate to the idea that in God we can find the place we belong? 
• Which line do you like the most? 
• Which line challenges you the most? 

Point out to the young people how different this is from the ‘perfect homes’ created at the start of the session. The writer of the psalm rejects all the ideas we may have come up with, claiming that one day in God’s presence is worth more than all the treasures we can imagine. Can we get a hold of how big a statement that is? 

As you draw the session to a close, invite the young people to  take their copies of the psalm, or their favourite verse away with them. Challenge them to spend some time alone with God this week and reflect on what it means to ‘belong’.