No. 44 Change #2

Facilitator______________
Date___________________

Group Session Plan from FUSN (developed by Linda Morrison)

Chalice/Candle Lighting

Opening Words:

Change has considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better. Obviously, then, one’s character and frame of mind determine how readily one brings about change and how one reacts to change that is imposed on one.
-King Whitney Jr., President, Personnel Laboratory Inc.

Check-in/Sharing

Topic/Activity:
Change is everywhere. It is going on all the time—within us—and all around us. Often, we are free to choose the changes we want to make. Other times the changes are imposed upon us—we have no choice. How we choose to change and how we respond to the unlooked-for changes that sometimes appear in our lives, affects the spiritual quality of our lives.

Many of us can read forever about the many ways we should make changes, but they are often particularly difficult to enact. How much easier it is to take the road most traveled than it is to make changes or strike out on a new path. When we fail to make changes we’d like to make, we can blame our failure on advertising, the white male patriarchy, a hated political party, our abusive parents, etc. Or we can reinforce our own lack of self-esteem by considering ourselves to be failures. Instead, however, we could always choose to simply say to ourselves, “I tried that and it didn’t work—now I’ll try something different.”

Select the topic and location for the next meeting

Check-out / Likes and Wishes

Closing Words:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
-Reinhold Niebuhr