Youth News 5
It has been a busy month for our Youth Group with lots of activities happening…
Honour Thy Mother and Father
With our intense involvement in the Easter celebrations during April, we postponed the April meeting to the start of May. Our theme for the meeting was a Diocesan wide initiative from Catholic Youth Parramatta – a reflection on the 4th commandment was Honour thy Mother and Father. We started the night with a Communion Service led by Terry. In what has now become a tradition in our Youth family we moved on to – Worship Through Music, led by Alina W and our Youth Band. With the expansion of Youth Group to include years 5 and 6, we introduced a new Buddy System and paired a “Junior” (years 5, 6 and 7) with a “Senior” (years 8, 9, 11 and 12) to give our seniors an opportunity to take a leadership role. This worked well with some great new bonds created. This will be a new segment that will be repeated at each meeting. Following dinner, we split into our Juniors and Seniors for a reflection of what this Commandment means and how we can live it out in our everyday lives. Tying in with this theme, we discussed Dolly’s Day with a Commitment to Kindness and rounded the night off with some fun games.
Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done. Prov 19:17
This month saw us introduce our first Social Justice initiative – Helping Hands Food Drive. Our youth and their family were invited to take the time to cook and deliver homemade meals for our homeless. It would have been easy for us to simply ask for the food to be donated – any food, pre-made or store bought, but we wanted this to be an opportunity for our youth to have time to think about what they were cooking, who they were cooking for and what it would be like not to have access to not just a warm meal, but any meal at all. To ensure that this happened, we asked parents to make sure that the youth were involved in the preparation of the food. After we cooked our meals in the comfort of our homes with electricity, running water and utensils, we delivered them into the care of Jessica M who was part of a team that drives into Martin Place in the city to deliver and serve the food to the homeless following the prayer of Our Father from the back of a van.
The team was very grateful to receive our food and we are currently planning our next Helping Hands Food Drive.
Who am I?
For our final Youth Group for the month Friday our Youth came together to celebrate the question Who am I? The focus for this meeting was to give everyone an opportunity to reflect on who each one of us is, at our core and to accept that God loves us just was we are, perfect in his image. We started the night as a combined group, gathered together for Worship Through Music, led by Alina W. This was followed by our first guest speaker in our series “Hanging with….” June S. Jessica B and Danijela H were our Interviewers and led the session with a series of questions before the floor was opened for questions from the audience. We then broke into our Buddy Session so that our Juniors had an opportunity to check in with their Senior buddies about their week with a focus of what positive things happened. After this we broke into our Juniors and Seniors groups to focus on our Who am I? discussions. In both groups there were some great reflections around our topic question with the core message being well received.