stories

(photo by Avery - celebrating my super fun braids)

In the worship class I am teaching at church - we have been recognizing the importance of learning to develop character and integrity within our artistic temperaments. We've been especially focusing on not only the internal character issues, but how we can take all our individual strengths and preferences, and work well within a team. Great discussions. Yesterday, I divided everyone up into small groups and gave each group an identical list of completely random words. Working off the lists, each team had 10 minutes to write a story using as many of the words as possible.

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10 minutes - Go.

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It was faaaaaabulous to hear what came out of it. In addition to all the laughter as the stories were being written, the stories themselves were... riveting (to use a word that came up a lot yesterday). We had everything from the rock star Caterpillar Monkey Musical Worship band's catapult into success - to a beautiful devotional about cooperation with a moral at the end that would have made any sundayschool teacher proud.

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Working in a team to write the stories brought ideas and a shape that wouldn't have come if I would have given the same list of words to each individual. We inspire each other. What was also interesting to me, is that each team had the exact same resources - yet, came up with a completely different story. I know there is a really great teaching on working well within a team and teamship identity somewhere... maybe someone wants to write it for me and I'll bring it to my group in our next time together.

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Or maybe you want to write your own story...

The words we used are...

Beginning * Language * Proud * Monkey * Children * Guitar * Cold * Worship * Rain * Paint * Picnic * Heart * Clean * Teacher * Cooperate * Water * Music * Read * Thirsty * Caterpillar * Grow * Mountain * Neighbor * Share * Work together * Balloon * Song * brother * Shoes * play * sunrise

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10 minutes.... go!