We're baaaack!

Well, everything's back in the van, I have a hand-colored picture of Sparky the dragon, and the chorus for "Hey, hey, Goliath" is firmly entrenched in my head. Week one of VBS- complete.  

A knight's armor...in edible form. Why yes, that is a Pringles shield of faith and cheese puff shoes of peace. 

I was happy to spend my first week back on the post-pandemic Bible school circuit in Newton. If you've ever wondered if Mobile United Methodist Missionaries serves only United Methodist churches, the answer is no! We'll hang out with anybody who wants a hand sharing God's love in their southern Iowa communities. This week brought me to a community VBS joining First Lutheran and United Presbyterian, and I could not have asked for better help. We had somewhere around 25 kids join us for at least some of the week, and some older sibling teenage helpers were worth their weight in gold. 

We are using Cokesbury's Knights of North Castle curriculum this year, and we were all pretty excited to realize that the fellowship hall where we were holding opening and closing time looked pretty castle-like all on its own. This proved to be an even better location when the other church lost air conditioning in its sanctuary the week before VBS, so that worked out splendidly! (Thursday set heat records and there was work on the roof, so we were a little more inside than we had originally planned.) 

With small groups, I tried out some more of the active learning stories from the Bible lesson book. We had a lot of fun with that as well as practicing our Bible-handling skills by looking up the stories. This is a great time to get to talk with kids and see what they're understanding. In my preschool group, for example, we got to learn that a stable is not that little piece of metal that holds papers together. :) 

It was nice to get back into the swing of things again- the quest continues!