Day Four (Tuesday)

Day two of VBS is done with - and what a day! On Monday we had 14 children - which is about what we averaged at Appalachia. On Tuesday, we had 30 kids! They just seemed to come out of the woods! What a great blessing - it caused our team to test their flexibility, but it was worth it. It is awesome to see so many kids get into the lessons about Jonah, singing silly VBS songs, feeding the coy pond goldfish with their goldfish crackers ... just enjoying all the aspects of this year's VBS! We are doing this VBS at Glencairn Gardens and it has a really interesting history to it. It was founded by Dr. Bigger, who wanted to have a garden in his backyard. He had about 5 acres on his property, and went to work on creating a beautiful garden for him and his wife. He decided to name it Glencairn after his home place in Scotland. And, here we are today, a church from a denomination that comes from Scotland, helping a church from the same denomination, in a gardens named after a home place from Scotland. In my Scot-Irish Presbyterian mind, this is God's gracious providence shining through! Here are a couple of pics of the area:

That evening, we went out to Olivet Presbyterian. This is the church that Beth and I consider to be our home church. Here is why - it was my first ministry job; I graduated from college while there; Beth and I dated while there; Beth graduated college while there; we were engaged while there; we were married at the church; went to seminary while there; graduated seminary while there! So, a good bit of our life together is wrapped up in Olivet PCA. So, it was a special treat for me to take the WOARP group there for the evening. It was nice to come back and have so many folks from the church come up to the church to meet the group and see the work going on! The missions committee provided dinner for us - and then about 30 kids from the church and community showed up. We went down to the ball field to play a very large game of softball, and then we came back up to the church. Our WOARP group led the singing - and then we did the entire book of Jonah in 10 minutes. It was quite a skit! There is a video of it that may show up one day soon! This is a pic of the Olivet kids we hung out with:

It was a great day - and now on to Wednesday, the 4th!