Whenever we do a youth Sunday school lesson or other youth group event, we start off with an active game or activity that loosens people up, gets them working together (or competitively), and breaks the ice a little bit before we dig into deeper conversations. But here’s a game that allows you to literally break ice with your group!
Game Summary: Break your group up into teams (we’ve used groups of 5 people before, but it would work with groups of even 2 or 3 people each). Present them with a bowl of ice and a towel, and tell them that their goal is to make the ice disappear. There are no rules to the game, except that they can’t eat the ice. But they should make all the ice disappear by melting it. You can do this game indoors or outdoors. We did it indoors, so wished we’d brought a couple extra towels, as there was water everywhere after the game, so you might want to consider that for your class!
What you need: One bowl per team, bags of ice (we used a 1 kg bag of ice for each group of 5 teens), and one towel per group. Extra towels for clean-up if you’re playing inside.
Time: To melt the 1kg of ice on one team of 5 people, it took about 10-15 minutes. If you don’t have that much time, maybe just use 0.5kg of ice per group.
How it plays out: It is so amusing to watch this game get played. It was about 35 degrees Celsius in the room, so our group was thrilled to play with ice, but their hands started freezing as soon as they started playing. They got super creative – they blew on the ice, tried to suck on it and spit the water back into the bowl (gross, I know), tried sticking cubes of ice behind their knees, just tried rubbing the ice with their hands and the towel. Eventually, they put the ice on the floor and just started smashing it with their feet. One team definitely beat the other by a long shot – with a HUGE puddle of water left on the floor as a result. But…it’s just water and cleaned up quickly!
The point: We explained that God has His will, but we also have our own will. Ice is like our own will. It seems solid, like we have rock-solid plans for our life. But very easily, with a bit of friction and heat, what seemed like solid plans melt into water and then evaporate. Meanwhile, God’s will spans generations, centuries, and millennia. His plans, we can’t even see them sometimes, but His will is perfect, because it is part of the story of the whole world and all time. So we need to trust that He is working all things together for His good.