July 15 – “Brave”

VBS Day One highlight: A Mom came to drop off her children.  She commented, “We brought kids to Vacation Bible School here back when Anna was leading it.  Now those kids have all grown up and have kids of their own.  Now we are here with our second batch.”  She proceeded to register three kids.  It’s great to be a pastor in a small town. 

VBS Day Two highlight: The theme of the week is “Off the Map.”  The idea is to make Jesus your guide in all your decisions and in life in general.  The rooms are decorated like a jungle, and there are blow-up figures of animals everywhere.  The craft for the day was an interesting one.  The kids were seated at tables and the leader announced that they would be making maps, certainly a valid project for the “Off the Map” theme.  But then she walked around and squirted shaving cream in front of each one.  Lots of shaving cream.  Globs and globs of shaving cream.  She encouraged the kids to have fun.  What kid needs more encouragement than that when faced with a massive handful of white goop?  They made mountains.  They saw how much they could pick up before it splatted back down to the table.  They even did a fairly decent job of keeping it off their faces (that was one of the rules – faces and each other).  Not so much clothes, though.  But hey, it was just soap, right?  The real sight came when Lauren added squirts of tempera paint to the mix.  The swirls then took on a whole new dimension.  And finally she brought in the paper for their maps.  The kids swirled across the paper for a bit, and then headed off to get cleaned up.  Workers were then instructed to carefully wipe the excess cream off of the papers and put each child’s name on the back and let them dry.  Amazingly enough, when went back to look at them later, they looked like an HGTV kitchen countertop with swirls of color in them.  The kids later came back and write the day’s Bible verse on them.  Gotta say, I have never seen that one before.  I wasn’t the only one whose comment was, “Brave.”

Isaiah 1:18  says, “’Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord.  ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.’”

Father, thank you for the creativity of the workers and the children this week.  Great reflection of what you showed when you created them in the first place.  Amen.