A young teenage youth spent many hours building a little sailboat, crafting it down to the finest detail. He then took it to a nearby river to sail it. When he put it in the water, however, it moved away from him very quickly. Though he chased it along the bank, he couldn’t keep up with it. The strong wind and current carried the boat away. The heartbroken youth knew how hard he would have to work to build another sailboat.

“Little strokes fell great oaks.”–Benjamin Franklin

The February 1998 issue of Success magazine contains an excerpt from a story that the magazine printed 100 years ago. The article, “A single-minded Tom Edison,” contains an interview with Thomas A. Edison, the great inventor.

Here is part of the conversation Theodore Dreiser had with Edison:

Anonymous

An old man going a lone highway
Came at the evening cold and gray
To a chasm vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a swollen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim
That swollen stream held no fears for him
But he paused when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.

When people around the world describe the qualities that make their family strong, these are some of the things they talk about.*

Appreciation and Affection

• We appreciate each other and let each other know this.
• We enjoy helping each other.
• We like keeping our promises to each other.

A while back I was reading about an expert on the subject of time management. One day this expert was speaking to a group of business students and, to drive home a point, he used an illustration I’m sure those students will never forget:

Introduction
Use this activity to introduce a topic and divide the youth into small groups or teams at the same time.

Game Description
Youth will break into groups with the each youth forming one of the letters of a keyword.

Game Materials
None

STRESS SCALE FOR YOUTH

You may be coping unsuccessfully with personal stress if you:

1. Don’t take vacations or don’t enjoy them when you do take them.
2. Don’t have a sense of humor.
3. Don’t recognize when you are getting fatigued.
4. Believe that being busy means being productive.

• A youth’s bedroom isn’t cluttered; it’s “passage-restrictive.”
• Youth don’t get in trouble anymore. They merely hit “social speed bumps.”
• Youth don’t have a bad hair day; they’re suffering from “rebellious follicle syndrome.”
• No one’s tall anymore. They’re “vertically enhanced.”
• Youth are not shy. They’re “conversationally selective.”

Description
Youth Bible study activity using wind-up toys. Works great as a discussion about free will or for discussing running in the Christian race. It could also be tied into Disney’s “Toy Story 3″ in which Andy is all grown up now and ready to leave home for college. For the toys, the prospect of having no one who will Love them and spend time with them takes them down a path of despair and filled with dangers. Andy has to learn to put away childish things and the toys find purpose in bringing joy to another young person, filled with life, energy, love and childish delight. Sometime we also feel that God has set us aside and gone on to other things. But he hasn’t forgotten us. He will always be there for us. And like the toys, we may find our energy exhausted, and ourselves in less than pristine condition, but we find great joy in life when we are fulfilling the purpose for which we were created.