This week has been a whirlwind of planning and strategizing and logistics. I'm exhausted. Plus my brain hurts.
And it's only Wednesday.
But this is typical of the week before VBS (Vacation Bible School) in the lives of the volunteers involved with this yearly event at our church. I have the glorious job of Registration. Which means I am tasked with tracking the children participating, as well as the volunteers, creating the daily schedule, assigning volunteers to their jobs and children to their crews. It's data and organizing and spreadsheets, which (oddly) is something I'm not only good at, but actually enjoy.
Still, in the madness of summer, it seems there's never enough hours in the day, never enough volunteers, and an unending flow of kids. Last year's VBS totalled 230 kids that swarmed the halls of the church building.
This is no small job.
As I was piling dishes into the dishwasher the other day, my mind idly listed all the little tasks that needed to be accomplished. Purchasing T-shirts in an array of colors for the volunteers, creating a spreadsheet of aforementioned volunteers and their assigned locations, emailing that plus more information to those same volunteers, the list kept going. As I looked around my kitchen, a separate list was beginning to emerge, a list of housework that has been grossly neglected in the last couple of weeks. My home could be the setting for a bad TV horror movie, entitled, "The Flooring The Mop Forgot."
The girls were busily working with markers and paper at the kitchen table a few feet from me. I was pulled out of my thoughts by the voice of Miss Priss exclaiming, "Here, Sunny, let me draw Jesus for you."
Curious, I wandered over to see what the munchkins were up to.
Miss Priss had drawn a colorful picture of she and Sunny, both blond, standing on either side of a long-bearded Jesus. In front of Sunny was a sketch of the same trio on another piece of paper, meant for her to color in. Both were completed with frames.
"Why did you make Sunny blond?" I asked, twirling a lock of Sunny's dark strands.
"Because!" Priss started, "I wanted to!" Ah! Sweet revenge for all the times I have answered her query of "why" with "because I said so!"
It was just about the cutest thing I'd ever seen them do. In fact, it is now officially on my list of Top Ten Cutest Things The Girls Have Ever Done Together, right behind "reading books and giggling on the bedroom floor," and just above "holding hands with bear in between."
I gushed over their drawings the way any good mother would, then returned to my dishes and the to-do list in my head.
I went about my day of data entering, and spreadsheeting, and emailing, but the girls and their pictures continued to enter my thoughts.
This is what VBS is, I surmised, this is what we are hoping to do with all the T-shirts and decorations, the games and the balloons, the volunteers and the organizers. We do this with a hope and a prayer that these 200+ kids, the majority having no affiliation with our church, will be able to picture themselves with Jesus. Will come to understand the God that loves them, unconditionally and without end.
