When scissors cut living things like hair or plants or bushes, the results can look thinned out, but it’s just a prelude to the growth that will result in more beauty and fullness. Use scissors as the object for your Sunday school curriculum on self growth.
RELATED SCRIPTURES:
John 15:1-2
OBJECTS NEEDED:
Scissors, 2 bushy house plants. The class will prune one, so be sure you’re working with one that will not be hurt in the cutting.
PREPARATION:
Hide one of the bushy houseplants out of sight so that the class can’t see it. Cut half the blooms away yourself so that it is only half as fruitful as its hidden partner.
LESSON:
Hold up scissors. I’m going to start today with a story about a girl named Rachel. She had long pretty hair, maybe halfway down her back. She used to sleep with braids in it because, even though it was really shiny and pretty, it was just a little thin. And the waves put in by the braids made it look thicker”¦ and more pretty than it actually was.
One day, something awful happened. She woke up, and there was a huge wad of gum in her hair, up close by her neck, all tangled. Did your parents ever tell you not to go to sleep with gum in your mouth???? Rachel’s mom was only glad that Rachel hadn’t choked to death. Rachel was hysterical.
She had to get her hair cut off to the base of her neck.
Hold up the scissors. These were the last thing that Rachel wanted taken to her hair. Once short, she felt like she’d lost the one thing that made her pretty.
God talk about “pruning” in the Bible. Jesus said in John 15:1-2, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”
Have you ever had a time in your life when something was taken from you? A home that you loved?
Maybe you had your own room and then suddenly had to share with a sibling? Were you ever really good at a sport but you got injured and couldn’t play for a season? These are all examples of “pruning” in life – things that look like a loss, but God makes them great gains.
Bring out the plant that is half pruned. We prune plants all the time. Cut off a bloom. It looks like we’re making the plant uglier, but the plant will grow bushier and even more beautiful if we use the scissors on it. Let’s prune it together.
Let the children take turns passing the scissors, cutting off either a bloom or cutting back a stalk.
Rachel went around with her head down and her face scowling for a few weeks. She would look at herself in the mirror and say, “I’ll be ugly for at least three years!” What happened to her was amazing.
Once she wasn’t focused on her own beauty, she began to notice beauty in others. She began to develop inner beauty, and rather than just focusing on her hair, she found herself focusing on things like being nice to a person everyone else was mean to. She didn’t know why or where it came from.
When kids got bullied in school, it got to her. She started a web site where kids who got bullied could come and post. She couldn’t believe that kids were posting from as far away as New Zealand, which is near Australia. She won an award from her school and a scholarship to college.
And all the while, Rachel’s hair was growing back. But somehow”¦it didn’t matter as much. She noticed one day that her hair was as long as it used to be and that now, it was actually a lot fuller. But she wouldn’t have time to braid her hair every night even if she still needed to. She was counting posts on her web site and answering the ones she could give advice to.
“I used to be a bully,” she admitted to one scared freshman. “Bullies are actually scared themselves. If you stand up to them without getting mean, they can’t feed off your fear and they’ll leave you alone,” she said.
One day, Rachel realized her hair had grown to her waist. She’d been told in school that she had the most beautiful head of hair and she mighty be named in the yearbook for “Best Hair.”
But she had other plans in mind. With hair that long and beautiful, surely it could profit some kid who had cancer. She went to the beauty parlor and had them take off a two-foot-long piece for a wig, so some girl with cancer could go to school and look pretty too. Her hair was to her shoulders again. But her heart was long”¦and deep and wide.
Rachel had been successfully pruned. When something bad happens in our lives, we should ask God how we can use this to be even bigger people. That is a prayer we can never be sorry for praying. God will always answer. If everyone prayed like this, we would have a world full of extraordinary people.
We’d be like a plant. Hold up the now-pruned bush. Doesn’t look very good. But we all want a chance to be great, right? Go and get the other plant with all its blooms. If we believe, if we give God a chance, and we accept what’s happened to us and look for good in it, we’ll be even more beautiful afterwards.
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