Promise City

As I look forward to this next week of Bible school, I realize I haven't written anything about last week yet! How time flies...

This past week we were in Promise City. This was a new town for us, and the United Methodist church here was recently closed down. We had VBS in the community center, which is a very nice building with air conditioning that we especially appreciated on Wednesday, dubbed by weather people as the hottest day of the year.

We started out the week with 8 kids, and we had a handful of others who came on some days, so I'd say we had a grand total of 11 or 12. Of those, we now have 5 coming to camp- so exciting! This was truly a great group of kids. They were very good listeners and sang well enough to make up for their small numbers! The first day, they weren't quite sold on the songs yet, but on the next few days, we had a few kids who got there as soon as we did, headed straight for the CD player, and listened and sang along with some of their favorites. We also got to make some music with the boomwhackers and gave a mini-performance for our kitchen helpers- fun for everyone. On the last day, a man who helped organize for us to come treated us all for ice cream at the No Name Cafe across the street.

Ice cream and good music aside, the kids learned a lot this week. I heard many good discussions coming from the older class about peer pressure and taking time for God. In the younger group, we reviewed the stories and talked about what we can learn from space- like how comets look beautiful when they're close to the warmth of the sun and how we look beautiful when we're close to the love of God. Some of the students brought their own Bibles this week, so we practiced looking up Scripture references. A student barely old enough to read proudly showed me her Bible, flipped through it, and explained that she usually just skipped over the red stuff. I asked her if she knew why those words were red, and explained that those were the best part, because Jesus said them. She looked at me for a minute, decided I was telling the truth, and then yelled across the room to her brother, "Guess what! The red words are the best part! Do you know why?...." We also had a chat about how "the new part of the Bible" (the New Testament) was not really that new, so even old Bibles would have it included. :-)

All in all, this was a week well worth the daily hour and a half drive from Kirkville. This coming week, we're off to Cantril, home of the Dutchmen's Store!