Broughton School

This morning I went to do the assembly at Broughton School.  I started with the song So Many Ways to Praise the Lord.  After the song I asked for two helpers and two girls came out to the front (first hands up)  I gave one a plate and the other a tube of toothpaste and asked her to use it to draw on the plate which she did.  I showed the school what she had drawn and encouraged her to draw some more but this time I held the tube and gave it a big squeeze so that loads of toothpaste came out making rather a mess.  I got them to swap places and asked if they could now put the toothpaste back into the tube - which they couldn't of course.  I used this idea to talk about how we speak, sometimes good things come out of our mouths but sadly bad things come out too and like the toothpaste once it has been said you can't take it back in again.  I gave a few examples of nasty things people may say.  I then displayed a verse from James which says... It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke with it... the Message version explains it better.  I asked if anyone had seen the fires a few weeks ago in Canada and how they destroyed so much of the forest.  Our tongue can be like that when we use it in the wrong way.  I also linked it to using God's name as a swear word too and displayed Exodus 20:7 about using God's name in vain.  After this we sang Shine and I explained that this is what God wants us to do shine for him.  After the song I noticed that the theme for assemblies this half term was on courage and they had displayed some people who stood up for what the believed in so I made a link here to by saying these people used their tongue to speak out for good.  I then said a prayer to end the assembly.