Mission With a Message

The Thursday slide show is live! One of my favorite things about VBS is the crafts. I remember specific details about things I made at VBS at my childhood church in S.C. — gluing macaroni noodles onto cardboard to make a Noah’s Ark mosiac, making a matchstick cross and making various things with beads. I’m so grateful to the craft team at my current church. They do a fabulous job!

As I said about Wednesday at VBS, I was also very impressed with this year’s decorations, but I still didn’t manage to get the kinds of pictures I wanted to get so I could show them in the blog. Above, the stars on the floor (see? details like that mean so much!) inspired me in writing scripts and for the music too. I did get lots of nice pictures of the decorations, but they all include the beautiful faces of our VBS kids. I guess I never had time to go back when no one was there to capture the decorations by themselves. After the Friday celebration, another church came and took a lot of the decorations we had to use for their VBS. Oh well, hakuna matata!

This year’s VBS theme was Space Camp, a mission to outer space and a mission here at home as well. Some of the things we learned that relate to space include:

God is always there, even when we can’t see Him, just like the moon is always there even when it’s behind the clouds.

We learned that we become more beautiful in the eyes of God as we become closer to Him, just like comets become more beautiful as they get closer to the sun.

But in addition to the space mission, we were also on a mission to collect items for the Food Pantry at our church. By the end of the week, we had collected hundreds of nonperishable foods. I was very impressed with the Mission Team for organizing the food and then showing the kids the pantry and explaining to them why their donations are so important and why it’s important to volunteer time to help organize and distribute the food.

Awesome shirts on these twins!

A-hem. Don’t look at my pale legs. By the way, see my awesome camera bag? Oh nooooooo! The strap is so frayed on two ends that it could break apart at any moment. I love that camera bag, but I believe it’s going to need to be replaced soon. Debating on whether to get the same bag or the new version that is slightly larger. Thoughts?

I will miss Leo! But, he does have one more performance on Sunday! Come to worship at the First Presbyterian Church in Metuchen at 9:30 if you’d like to see how awesome my son is at voicing our amazing Leo. (Which reminds me — I need to write that script. Sigh.)

Our assembly games this year were completely researched and coordinated by two of our youth members. (I don’t have a blogable picture of them — the picture above shows one of the games they coordinated.)

Each game related to the overall theme as well as to the theme of the day. They did an excellent job on that. The little kids LOVE cheering on their youth leaders.

One of my favorite things of the whole week — seeing so many of the little kids (and not-so-little ones in 5th and 6th grade) STAND UP when they were asked if they aspired to be a youth leader some day. Parents take note: your kids and teenagers DO want to be involved in church! The youth program at my church ROCKS!

And speaking of the youth group, more than 75 youth members of our church will be going on a Habitat for Humanity mission trip to N.C. in a few weeks. Proceeds of any VBS print sales go directly to the mission trip fund. More info about that in a future blog post. (The print gallery isn’t ready yet.)

Everyone LOVED the relay!

Leo!

Don’t worry — we did not burn down the church.

Check back soon for the awesome FIRETRUCK FRIDAY slide show!