My Absence

Busy, busy, busy. In three words, that describes the last month and a half of my life. Around mid-May, I was contacted by my church to see if I would be interested in helping out with a VBS. I love participating in VBS and was immediately on board. At our first planning meeting, I was asked to take on the bulk of the planning/organizing and thus became the primary director of VBS for our entire church. What a blessing! To have only been here for 9 months and really to have only been at my church for about 5 months and to be invited to take part in such a great event. I was truly honored. 

We only had about 6 weeks from that planning day before our VBS was scheduled to start. So I have been SWAMPED with to do lists, shopping trips and countless hours at the computer writing curriculum. Obviously my blog has taken the brunt of the hit, as has my house. But it was SO worth it. I always feel refreshed after a week of VBS. I love to teach and as I have said before, vacation bible school is my "shot in the hip" if you will that gets me a taste of teaching without all the craziness of a full year in a classroom. 

Our little church has a big heart for Jesus and just wants to get that out to the community. We decided to host a family fun night at one of our local parks. This was the Sunday before the start of VBS. It was free to the community and was meant to serve as a kick-off for all the activities that were to follow. Claire had a BLAST there and even consented to have her face painted! Here are a few pics from the week.

Claire and her friend, Joy.

Sarah enjoyed her first taste of Kettle Corn and was a big fan!

It was so wonderful to watch Claire singing praises to the Lord who made her.

We did a really cool experiment that shows the plan of salvation. By mixing a few chemicals, you turn a golden solution (meant to represent purity) into a black solution (meant to represent our lives full of sin). Then when you mix the black solution together with the "red" solution (which represents Christ's blood) the two combined cancel out and the mixture turns clear (forgiven sin). It was AMAZING and the kids really got it! 10 of the 60 present wanted to give their lives over to the Lord!

Now that VBS is over and the fog has started to settle, I've emerged from my planning cocoon and am doing my best to get life back to normal. Today is house cleaning/catch-up day and hopefully from this point forward I'll be able to pay more attention to my little blog. I may have to discipline myself to do one blog per day for awhile to get myself back into the swing. So check back tomorrow and see if I managed to follow through with that one!

I'll leave you with a fun video clip that my amazingly talented brother put together. We wanted a little video of VBS events to show our congregation but we didn't have anyone who could put one together. So I uploaded a few pictures, music and a little video and sent it to my brother in Nashville, TN. And in one day, he put this amazing video together! What a great brother, huh? 

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