Vacation Bible School

The Vacation Bible School Phenomenon

Is VBS a local phenom? I don’t know, but the signs pop up in church yards each summer. I remember a friend telling me how nice it was to bring her kids to VBS for a couple hours each evening Monday through Thursday while she got some needed shopping done or went out with just the husband. It sounded great, so I thought I would try it.

My first attempt was last summer, when Marc and Luc were three. They can be a handful by themselves and when I saw 17 preschoolers and two teachers the first night, I stayed. Tim and Sarah seemed to do okay in their classes. Sarah cried but made friends with her teacher, who actually carried her around. Sarah loved it. I would wave to them as our preschooler group passed them going from craft time to snack time to games to story time and back to the big group at the end. I thought, ‘maybe tomorrow night”…but I ended up planting seeds, passing out pretzels, and encouraging three year olds to listen to the story, and I was enjoying myself.

I thought, ‘maybe tomorrow night, I’ll slip away”, but that was the night Tim refused to listen and ran away. The pastor actually had to pick him up like a sack of potatoes after a 50 yard chase toward a busy road. I noticed him talking in the hallway with the pastor while passing from story to snack with the boys, and we all had a nice chat.

I thought “maybe tomorrow night, I’ll stick around.” Tim had a better attitude, we prayed about it, and hopefully learned something. So I stayed, glued popsicle sticks together, and helped color pictures of Jesus. To my surprise, I discovered this was our last night of VBS, and they even gave us a CD with some great songs that we sang in the van for months. I decided the pros outweighed the cons and we tried again. This time, at my parents’ church. Tim and Sarah didn’t want me to leave at all, even though Grandma and Grandpa were there, and since Ryan was in Grand Rapids, I stayed and had a great time helping.

This year, we went to three VBS’s, and you guessed it, I never escaped once, but to be honest, I didn’t try that hard. They even had a pool party and home-made tarp/sprinkler/tube water slide at our last one. My parents’ church even gave me a volunteer name tag on the third night. My children memorized scriptures, played with other children, respected authority, loved snack, and got to see people serving Jesus night after night, (plus they slept like logs).

I still have this fleeting dream of kissing my children and skipping away, hand in hand with the husband through a field of daisies toward a cute coffee shop, but…”maybe next year