My dad had just died a few months earlier and we decided to go spend a month of the summer with mom. It was right during a dinosaur-themed Vacation Bible School at her church. I have a confession - I have a love/hate relationship with VBS. Love the kids! Hate the craziness. I am a huge advocate of creativity, but sometimes what we call creative is just craziness in disguise. God is creative, for sure, but trying to make snacks shaped like objects from the bible lesson is just plain crazy! There is no such thing as a sanctified snack so why go there? One night, after painting a huge mural of a dinosaur scene on two king size sheets for my mom's class, I was ready to go coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs-insane!!! I couldn't sleep and kept asking myself...why am I doing this?
The sarcastic PK (Pastor's Kid) in me came out as I googled "VBS dinosaurs driving me crazy" late that night. It was as if I could vent my frazzled feelings to the computer screen. Lo and behold, something surprisingly popped up in legitimate response. Someone had written a blog about this VERY subject! The title of the post: Those Wacky VBS Themes. And right there, next to the title was a picture of a dinosaur. Someone else was evidently going crazy while working on VBS, too. I read the blog and laughed til I cried. I scrolled through post after post that the author had written. I thought for a moment we had maybe lived the same life. Grateful that I wasn't the only person in the world questioning whether or not we'd gone overboard with church programs, I drifted off to sleep feeling a sense of relief. I wasn't alone. Someone else had been laughing at the craziness, too.
I returned to read more of the same blog the next morning. Again, I laughed until I cried. Who was this? He definitely had wrested through the same strange church questions I had been asking and had a knack for putting into funny stories. Then light bulb came on as I realized, this was another PK.
They say that the best comedy mixes enough truth with enough humor to make the audience comfortably laugh at subjects otherwise uncomfortable to talk about. This was the comedic relief I needed. It felt good to laugh about making silly foam crafts, strange action songs, and doofy puppet shows. Pausing to laugh about it all helped me realize something. We'll do insane things just to tell kids about Jesus. As long as they come away having heard about the Good News, it'll be worth it all.
Sometimes life isn't one thing OR the other. Sometimes it's AND. Church is good AND sometimes church is crazy. Stumbling across this blog, it surprised me how much I needed to laugh at the deranged things we do. But hey! If God can use the jaw bone of a donkey to do his will, why not a blog or a VBS craft!
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