VBS 2018

A month has passed since Vacation Bible School ended this year and I'm still working through my withdrawal.


I can live without the work, per se, but I miss the hours spent with the other staff ladies.

One great privilege of being a director is that I get to attend the daily directors' meeting, after most people have gone home.  This is where we discuss all the juicy stuff:  kids who trusted in Jesus; our first-ever VBS fistfight; special-needs kids having good days; encouraged and excited crew leaders; fifth-graders putting tacks on the toilet seats.


The first day, Monday, I went home in tears, feeling unsuccessful.  A program involving hundreds of kids and hundreds of volunteers and all the requisite moving parts has a lot of details that might go wrong.  There was so much room for improvement, and that's all I saw that day.  Plus it was coming off of a very late night of frantic prep the day before, and I was tired.


About 14 hours of sleep later (thanks to my understanding and generous husband), Tuesday was more encouraging.

Wednesday I showed up to church in the morning in tears, before the day even got going.  Somehow unrelated life has a way of still happening, even when you're in the midst of a big project.  We had all known and discussed that working on a VBS makes us a target for our enemy, and Wednesday morning I felt pelted by attack from without.


How humiliating is it to arrive blubbering to a place where you're supposed to be in charge of things?  Pretty embarrassing, yes.  Thankfully, I think my state reminded many others to be praying for protection as we worked to get the gospel out to all those children.


Thursday afternoon we had a post-meeting meeting to work out the list of clean-up duties for the next day.  By the end of many hours and little to eat, we were so deliriously tired, and our maturity level had dipped so low, that we couldn't even say the word "duty" without bursting into hysterics.

On Friday, mid-morning, another staff lady came and found me to tell me that Lizzy had fallen ill and was at the nurse's station.  Several women moved to fill my spot and I hurried off.  When I got to her, she was pale green and hunched up on the floor next to a trash can.  Immediately, the significance of my director name tag, my clipboard, my staff t-shirt melted to nothing, and I was just Mommy.


Apparently she was working on an activity with her crew and felt light-headed, and her crew leader looked at her just in time to see her faint (!), and she caught her in her arms.  [50 points to that awesome crew leader!]  So that's a first for Lizzy.


Being alarmed at the shade of green Lizzy was, and not knowing if she was coming down with a stomach bug, I sent her home with Daddy.  She cried to have to leave, but cheered up somewhat when we promised to collect all her take-home goodies and get them to her when I got home.


The rest of Friday was a long day after a long week.  After the morning was over, it was clean-up time, which we had done our best to organize the evening before at the immature meeting.  Like many other things, there was room for improvement in the details, but it got done eventually.

Another perk of directing, and staying to the exhausted, bitter end, is that I get to learn about all the scary, mysterious storage places in the church:  the basement with the slimy, silent water drip down the back wall, with the elevator so slow you have time to calculate how long you could survive with that many cubic feet of oxygen; the dark mezzanine closet, with an exposed industrial-grade I-beam across the doorway with a hand-written sign marked "DUCK"; Annex 1, which is filled with sawdust and broken sanctuary chairs; Mobile Unit 2, the old discolored trailer with temporary walls and piles of boxes and fake Mediterranean greenery.  Thankfully, none of my visions of The Shining came true, and I'm pretty sure everyone made it out alive to return for next year's VBS.