"Education............................."

Last night was the first of a week-long series of productions that the church world refers to as “Vacation Bible School”. Forty years ago that little old-time holiness bunch, an average crowd gathering for most any service numbering maybe seventy-five people, finances allowing little outreach, little anything other than needs for maintaining that small building that housed them, one summer started such a program, the present pastor but a teenager back then with a dream in his heart. Today it’s a huge event, this particular one an old west cowboy spectacular with the gymnasium restructured into a prospector’s mine, a sheriff’s office, hay, chuck-wagon, cactus, decorations everywhere, workers all garbed in bonnets and straw Stetsons. Crafts, food, fun, Bible lessons, and two bicycles awarded to whomsoever, at the end, has gained the most gold coins along the way…

Seed sown, I suppose, but one has to wonder how much chance it has to survive, to sprout and bring forth fruit in such soil as it has fallen… I sat in a six-hour class yesterday designed to teach me, along with different self-defense techniques and various manners of applicable restraints, the psychology of dealing with today’s children, a generation traversing a Hollywood, television, computer game driven amoral society, and I silently gave thanks for my own grandchildren being tutored in the church school. Not that such environment provides me with any guarantee of their “sanctification”. Forty years of Christianity has taught me well that humanity remains humanity, even armed with chapter and verse, even baptized, born-again, “dunked in the Holy Ghost”. The best odds we have is a lot of love, earnest prayer, and hearts surrendered unto Him……