Before the service:

First of all, make a pinata or buy one!  If you fancy making one, there is a link to some instructions here.

Fill the pinata with sweets so that there will hopefully be enough for everyone there. This is important!!

The aim of the talk is to help people to see that, out of something that seems hard and sad, something amazing can come.

Talk (after having previously told the Easter story)

Show the Pinata and ask if people know what it is. Tell them how long it took you to make it and how proud of it you are.  Do they know what to do with a pinata?  INvote someone to come up and show you.  Hopefully they will bash it and break it open to get to the sweets in the middle.

I feel a bit sad now!  That was a beautiful pinata and it took ages to make!  I’m really quite upset that it’s broken and ruined now.  At least we got something good from it- lots of sweets!

It reminds me a bit of today (Good Friday).  Something really terrible happened- Jesus died.  It felt like everything had gone wrong and was ruined but actually it was not the end of the story.  Something amazing came out of the bad thing!  Jesus rose to new life and he gives us hope of a new life and a new start too!  Sometimes we feel like things in our lives are broken and ruined because we’ve done things that we wish we hadn’t but, because Jesus died and that terrible thing happened, it means that he will take those wrong things away and we can have a new start with God.  Like all of the sweets that came out of the broken pinata, God wants to give us something sweet and show us how much He loves us and forgives us.  He also wants us to share His love with other people and to let them know that they can be forgiven too so let’s share out the sweets and make sure that everyone has a reminder of the Good thing God wants to give us!