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[PYCL: Encourage students to make "room" for angels & control how they experience all. (3)]
Possible Younger Class Lesson ideas for the Christian Science Bible Lesson on

“God the Only Cause and Creator”
for December 8, 2019

By Kerry Jenkins, CS, of House Springs, MO
Kerry.helen.jenkins@gmail.com 314-406-0041

Pycl #1: Take a walk, weather permitting, and think together about what God made. What do we see around us that hints at the all-good, beautiful, intelligence of God's creation? We can see this in many (even infinite!) ways. Sometimes it is in the beauty of nature. Sometimes it can be in the order of how cars stay on the correct sides of the roads, following traffic laws, or how buildings are built to withstand weather, etc. It doesn't matter where you have Sunday School, you can find ways to identify how God's creation is reflected in what we perceive and express.

If you cannot take a walk, find ways that we have expressed God's goodness, reflected the perfection or wholeness of His creation, in the past week. Did some of us express intelligence? Grace? Joy? These are the facts of His reflected creation. Everything we find then needs to be tied back to Spirit. If it is the beauty of a tree, then break this down into spiritual qualities that the tree reflects such as: strength, flexibility, color, safety (as a home for animals), nutrition (to feed birds with bugs it hides—spiritual nutrition might be thought of as "ideas"). You get the picture!

These qualities are not dependent on matter for their source or permanence. Let's make a "Christmas list" of these permanent qualities of creation with an idea toward thinking about the celebration of the birth of Jesus as evidence of this spiritual creation, its permanence, presence, power, its gift to us today. Then we can add to this "list" each week as we approach Christmas.

Pycl #2: Where does our "good" come from. Make as long a list as possible of everything good in our lives. Everyone keep adding and someone take all these ideas down if your class is old enough to be writing! Think about where these things come from. If it is a quality like the kindness and love expressed to us by our mom or dad, we can think about how mom and dad reflect the divine and infinite love of God. If it is a beloved bicycle, then the good that comes from that object is the freedom, speed, transportation, grace, agility, joy, and so on that we feel when riding that bike and all of these qualities come from God, the Only Creator, not from the pieces of metal and rubber on that bike.

You could even include gratitude for the intelligence that is reflected in how the bicycle was engineered, how the pieces were manufactured and so on! I love in citation S10 where we are told that Christianity causes us to turn from matter to Spirit…then we "appropriate" or take possession of the things that are spiritual, permanent, truly joy-giving. When we start to recognize that our freedom, agility, speed, joy, etc. from this bicycle analogy, don't actually derive from a physical object, a bicycle, then we can see these qualities expressed all around us, in us, through us— and they aren't limited in any way to an object that we may or may not possess.

We can think about how this is like not having any "graven images". That is, we wouldn't want to attribute life, "being", to a physical object. This would not be God's creation at all, but we attribute those "living" qualities to that which is spiritual, created by God.

Pycl #3: In the story in citation B6 a woman recognizes the spirituality of Elijah as he passes through her town and decides to build a room on the side of her house to make it comfortable for the prophet to stop in and rest there. Think together about what this might mean today for us—it is so fun to be able to understand how the Bible is powerful and useful to us today!

Can we make a "room" in our house, our spiritual consciousness, for prophetic ideas, or angel ideas? How would we "furnish" it? How can we "leave its door open"? Provide "light" or "air" so that the angel thoughts "rest" there or don't suffocate? Do we "feed" these ideas? I've been working with one of my boys a lot recently to think about how we can nurture joy by cultivating a positive sense of others rather than assuming the worst about them.

We get to determine how we experience the world around us to a large degree. If we are looking for the truth, the spiritual reality, we tend to find it, while if we approach life from a negative vantage point, determined to see the worst motives in others, we tend to feel less joyful and we don't often notice or enjoy the true nature of God's kingdom or creation.

Pycl #4: It may be helpful to the younger children to point out that matter is really a counterfeit of spiritual goodness, spiritual creation. It is that which tells us that there must be a mixture of good and evil. This is addressed a bit in citation S12.

You can bring in some game money and explain the idea of fake, or counterfeit money. Then also explain the fact that those who identify such things for a living, spend their training time studying the real thing, not the fake, so that they become so familiar with the real that the fake stands out to them. This is a great analogy for how we can look for God's spiritual, true and beautiful creation as a regular practice, so that matter doesn't so easily fool us!

Pycl #5: This summer I had the loveliest revelation about the story in citation B10. (Many of you will have had this realization a long time ago I'm sure!) It dawned on me that Jesus didn't "sleep through" the storm on the pillow at the back of the ship. There was actually no storm. While the disciples were incredulous that he was sleeping through the wind and waves, he was unimpressed. What he stilled was their fear, their false belief that there is a power other than God. This is what he "stilled" whenever he healed in opposition to material sense.

We know that Jesus didn't make "sick matter into well matter", no more did he make "turbulent weather into peaceful weather". In essence, mortal mind "makes up" sickness, storm, anxiety, fear… While the Christ reveals the truth of our wholeness, the peace and calm that surrounds God's creation.

Have a great week in Sunday School!

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