Jesus’ parents lose him on their way back from Jerusalem. This activity will help students explore the story by enacting the seeking and finding element. This is the active element of our Advent Lesson series called Prepare the Way. You can find all the lessons at the Prepare the way Page.

Ideally this activity would happen in a space larger than a classroom to allow for movement.

Tell the students – We are going to play a game like Hide and Seek, we’ll call it Hide and Search in honor of our lesson. We will need one volunteer to be blindfolded, they are the searcher. We need one volunteer to be the one being searched for. The rest of you are the crowd.

Take the searcher away from the group space and blindfold the searcher. Have the person being sought for in the space find a hiding space (must be accessible to someone blindfolded). Bring in the searcher once the person being sought is hidden. The one being sought will call out to the searcher to try to help them find them, but the crowd will also call out to try to confuse the searcher. The activity is done when the person is found by the searcher. Play more than once if time allows.

Questions after the Activity:

• Ask the searcher – how difficult was it to find the person hiding?
• Ask the person hiding – what made it difficult to call out to the searcher?
• What might the distracting voices of the crowd represent in our lives?

Final Word – Our lives are filled with lots of people searching for differing things, and with lots of distractions. God desires for you to find God, but we must identify and remove distractions which may keep us from God.