On this rock...

This past week brought me to Silver City. We started out with five kids, and throughout the week we gained two teenage helpers and a couple other friends for a total of nine different Navigators at our G-Force, plus four other helpers and two puppy dogs. The small turnout was perplexing to the church volunteers. There is a pretty good-sized youth group, so we need to get more creative next year and plan some activities for an older crowd instead of our normal VBS.

But of course, it's never about numbers anyway. We had a wonderful bunch of kids who LOVED the music- I think we went through ALL the songs on the CD, when I normally just use three or four. At prayer time one day, a boy requested we sing "that prayer song" that we had done the day before- "Spirit of God, empower me. Give me the strength to have faith and believe."

We wound up having some good conversations with our small group as well- including how the Bible
came into existence. The kids were understanding the stories well enough to put them in their own words- when asked what God asked Moses to do, one boy replied, "Go to the pyramids and unslave the people." I like it.

I loved this because the student added God being proud of Jesus healing Bartimaeus.

 Pastor Mike added to our church bank crafts. He told us about how Jesus told Peter that on this rock (Peter) he would build his church. He gave each child a rock to put inside their church bank to remember that Jesus builds his church on us too. Of course all this talk of building churches on rocks led to a goofy search around Silver City UMC's basement looking for the rock.... we pointed the kids to the mirror. :)



Our science activity reminded us that little things do make a big difference. As I added the food
coloring to the milk, they noticed the colors already spread and impacted each other a little. The impact was magnified ten fold by adding the dish soap- just like how God sends us out into the world to shake things up.

Change a Child's Story

This week, Cherie, Paige, and I met about how we can help the bishop's reading initiative, Change a Child's Story. We are putting together some resources and FAQs for churches who want to start an after school program involving literacy.

Here's why.

And then there were three (or, Fitting Bible School into a Ford Fiesta)

Though there were a few weeks in May I thought it may never come, summer is definitely upon us! A few days of cleaning my classroom, a few days of Annual Conference, and suddenly- poof! VBS time. Last summer, it worked really well to get Cherie started with a double week of Bible school- Vanderwilt Park and Beacon. We kept the same set up as I worked with Paige, our new summer assistant. Since there are now three of us traveling around, logistics of vehicles and materials gets a little more interesting. But Cherie thinks ahead, and I was amazed to find that all the Bibles, craft supplies, hula hoops, and a scaled-down puppet stand all fit into my car. (I guess that really shouldn't be too surprising considering the amount of stuff I cleaned out of it to get ready for summer.) We loaded it from her car to mine in under 15 minutes. Talk about a streamlined process.

So Paige and I made it out of Des Moines (despite my Family Circus cartoon style of navigation) on our way to VBS at Vanderwilt Park. The radio, oblivious to my destination, kept cheerfully reminding me that today was the hottest day of the year so far. Great.

When we got to town, I was greeted by my grandma, a wonderful woman who does not having "boring" in her vocabulary. Lately in her work at the thrift store, she had found some books with Shakespeare plays, and thus she greeted me, "How comest thou, travler?" She had already been over to the park, cleaned the restrooms, helped set up the canopy tent, and had breakfast ready for the kids. And I knew I was home.

We had 8-10 kids pretty consistently join us at the park. This is one of my favorite weeks, because we

get to enjoy the great outdoors and my church family and family family volunteers are awesome. We make our own community there in the park. It made me think of when we delivered presents to some of these same kids this Christmastime, and a little boy saw us in his doorway and said, "It's from my church!" Now several of these kids do go to a church (many get picked up on a bus from a town about an hour away, which is a whole other story), so maybe that's what he was talking about- but I definitely consider our singing, storytelling, conversations, and community there to be just as much "my church" as any steepled Sunday morning building I know.

Naturally, being outside presented some distractions- it was majorly hot for a couple days, rained for another, and somebody's pet cat came to visit us right in the middle of Moses talking to God in the burning bush, but overall, we had a great week. It worked out beautifully for us to be able to walk up to a free summer lunch site at the school, and the last day, our helper and resident Way Cool Musician Spencer took his guitar, harmonica, drum boxes, and jingling johnnies up to lunch with us so everyone could jam.

Now this was just the mornings. Evenings, Paige and I went to Beacon, where we were surrounded by fantastic helpers from their congregation. We had about 20 kids, including a really stellar 3rd/4th grade class (all boys except for one girl) who memorized the longest verse to share at the program. One family of boys said they wouldn't be there the next day because of a ball game- but the next day came, and there they were! They had decided they would rather come to VBS instead. How cool is that!

One of the helpers did woodworking and made cross necklaces for Paige and me. It's clear he really loved the kids and enjoyed being there to help. How wonderful to get to meet so many different people and hear how God is working in their lives!