The gift of VBS

When the kids filled the space and I briefly wondered how we were going to make this year’s VBS work in a building under construction, I was shocked when the word that popped into my head was “gift.”

That word kept reverberating in my head all week.

When kids sang and worshiped together, eagerly learning the motions for our VBS songs, I thought, “gift”.

When I paraded around the building singing at the top of my lungs with a ragtag bunch of preschoolers following me, I heard “gift”.

When I watched kids fill out their God sightings day after day, their hands shooting high into the air, eager to report how they’d seen God at work the day before, it was a gift.

When I came home each night from VBS, physically exhausted in a way that I haven’t been in a long time, I still kept thinking, “It’s a gift.”

Each night, as I rewrote openings and closings and realized the easy VBS isn't really all that easy, still the word circling in my head was “gift”.

When I saw Doug’s exhaustion as he tried to recover from a week in Senegal while teaching Deep Bible Adventure, I still thought, “What a gift to do this together.”

When I popped into Doug’s classroom and saw his sheer delight in teaching (and sometimes performing) Scripture, I still thought, “gift”.

When I made my kids tag along at our student ministry’s lunch midway through the week, I was struck by what a gift the presence of big kids are in the life of my kids.

That feeling continued when Kendall showed me the note her leader—one of the big kids—wrote to her at the end of the week. What a gift for a high school student to pour into my own kids.

As Kendall reached out to hug me every time I ran past her during the day, I again uttered, “Gift.”

At night, as Hope sang the VBS songs at the top of her lungs and I was honestly not sure whether I was in heaven or hell, I could only smile as I thought yet again, “What a gift.”

Even as a friend joked that the VBS math doesn’t add up; it’s not right to spend a 40 hour week on a program that’s only 2.5 hours for kids, I still couldn’t deny that the whole thing was a gift…even as I confessed that the math was more like 80 hours a week for me and other key leaders for the month leading up to VBS.

That’s the thing about the economy of God, though, isn’t it?

It’s always math that doesn’t add up.

And as the lines between sacrifice and joy blur, it’s all still a gift.