Caption: Sophomores lead “Reckless Love”, their first song chosen for Chapel. [By: Dr. Meier]
By Aline Dobashi
On Tuesday, November 11, the sophomore class at PACA hosted the eighth period chapel, a weekly meeting that happens every week for PACA high school students to help them focus on spiritual matters. The chapel was divided into three main parts, worship, testimony and message. The sophomores made the chapel a fun, deep and learning experiment through a very encouraging message.
During the first quarter of the school year, Lucas Ham Swisher (known as Mr. Ham), the coordinator of chapel, set up a plan so that each class had the opportunity to host a chapel at some point during the year. So far the seniors, the juniors and the sophomores have presented. Freshmen will host their chapel sometime during the second semester.
The chapel started with a prayer by Amanda Azevedo, the Sophomore Class President. After that there was a two-song worship period that was led by about 13 students singing up front, four students playing instruments and three students working backstage with the sound and the presentation. The songs chosen for that day were “Reckless Love” by Cory Asbury and “Bondade de Deus” by Isaías Saad.
After the songs, they played a video in which they presented a scenario where two sports teams were playing a game of basketball against each other. In the video, the loser team was actually playing for God and the winning team played for themselves. The scenario portrayed an interesting contradiction for the viewers. They portrayed the winning team actually ended up upset because they were thinking about other selfish things. However, the losing team was actually proud and grateful about their performance.
The explanation of the video was made by Hideki Yoshikawa, the Sophomore Class Vice-President. After he explained what happened in the video, he gave a short, personal testimony. In his testimony, he stated the fact that we do not know what God has in store for our lives. Still, we always need to believe that He has a greater purpose and continue having faith in Him.
After Yoshikawa’s inspiring testimony and prayer, Izabela Silva, the Sophomore Spiritual Life coordinator shared a quick, yet impactful message to end the chapel.
Silva shared a similar idea to what Hideki’s testimony was about. Along with a slide presentation, her main message stated that even though things may seem hard, you have to keep having faith in the Lord and knowing that everything He does is for a greater purpose.
She showed this through different metaphors shown in her presentation. The first one was that when someone walks in the dark with a lantern it is difficult to know what the next step will look like. This shows that this only takes a little faith in God. Even if you are not seeing your path very clearly, you can still know that you won’t fall. According to Silva, it is the same faith that can move mountains. She uses this metaphor to express the importance and the proportion of our faith.
The last metaphor she used was the metaphor of the rock that, when opened, reveals a beautiful jewel. She used this to express that even though situations may seem harsh, in the end, God has a purpose for everything.
When Silva was asked about what was her main inspiration for the main message she said, “My main goal was tying the entire chapel together by talking about how we should trust God’s plan. The whole inspiration actually came from a discussion we had as a class and we settled on the topic ‘Trusting God’s Plan’.”
With a final prayer, Silva ended the sophomore chapel. The sophomore class officers hope that this clear and purposeful message will plant seeds planted in the lives of the PACA high school students.
