Materials for Children
Materials Needed:
- One beautiful, living, potted flower plant with a big bow on the pot; like a pot of daffodils
- One metal bucket about one quarter full of coal
- Small buckets of coal at the exit doors.
- A plastic sheet, tarp or vinyl tablecloth to protect the floor or table, green is good. Avoid a distracting pattern or color.
Preparation:
Bury the coal under the flowers in the flowerpot. Bring the bucket with
just one piece of coal in it. Spread the plastic sheet on the area near
where the leader will be conducting the service. Place small buckets of
coal at exit doors.
Dialogue with the Children:
Leader says:
I think we are very lucky to live near our beautiful mountains.
Your families may like to spend time in the mountains looking at them,
camping, hiking, swimming, watching wildlife and looking at plants.
Our planet, the mountains, the rivers, the flowers and the stars are gifts
from God right?
God gave us our mountains and this beautiful planet as a present because
God loves us;
because we need a planet to live on, we just couldn’t live floating
around in space; and
because God wanted us to have something beautiful.
Leader shows the potted flower and admires it with the children.
These flowers look like a present from someone special.
Sometimes we give flowers to other people because we love them and want
them to have something beautiful.
If someone you love gave you these flowers, the flowers remind you of the
person who gave them to you right?
Can our mountains remind us of God that way?
If you got these flowers as a present from someone you love, would you take
care of them and keep them nice? Sure, you would water them and put them
where they could get sunshine and enjoy looking at them.
Shows a piece of coal.
This is a rock called coal.
Do you know what we do with coal?
It is burned to make energy for lights and everything that plugs into the
wall for power.
Coal comes from under the ground. Sometimes coal is inside mountains. Coal
is inside some of the mountains around here.
Getting coal out of a mountain is not easy.
Sometimes people tear down a whole mountain to get the coal out.
The trees and dirt get scraped off and the rock is blown up and the whole
mountaintop gets taken off to get to the coal.
After that the mountain is a mess.
This way of getting coal out is called mountain top removal coal mining.
This is a true story. You can drive just over an hour from here and see
where beautiful mountains used to be. Now there are just huge scraped off
flat places that can’t be mountains again.Pause
There is coal in this flowerpot, the flower that I got for a present.
I want to get it out, OK?
Leader turns pot upside down dumping the flowers out and all the
dirt and coal on top. The dirt should crush the flowers and leave a mess
on the plastic sheet.
Look at all that coal.
Can you put it in this bucket for me?
Children do that.
Leader sadly looks back and forth between the bucket of coal and
the crushed flowers.
I guess I traded my present for this coal.
Pause
How did watching me dump out my flowers make you feel? Bad, sad etc.
It made me sad too. Tearing up a special gift felt wrong to me.
Like doing a bad thing.
I don’t want to do that again.
Pause
I made a mistake didn’t I?
Sometimes you can learn from someone else’s silly mistake without
making the same mistake yourself.
Can you learn from my mistake and take care of the beautiful things God
gives you, like flowers and mountains?
One way you can take care of the earth is to turn off electrical things
like lights when they are not needed. Can you do that?
Thank you.
You can take a piece of coal if you want to help you remember.
To adult congregation
You can take a piece of coal on your way out too to help you remember.