These weeks of preparation

I’m not in a particularly liturgical church, but VBS seems sort of like Easter in some ways; you have to study and think about the gospel, do special shopping (balloons, object lessons, craft supplies) and there is a bit of anticipatory stress/excitement.

Two weeks ago Dr Labosier from Bethel Seminary of the East was pulpit supply while my pastor was on vacation.  He preached from Revelation 14:6&7, on the nature of the gospel – which  I usually think of as what you preach to beginners on how to get rid of sin – but this is a whole life sort of thing “Fear God and give him glory…Worship him.”  I’m not quite sure what it means if the gospel is something for established Christians to remind each other of, and think about.  So I guess I’m thinking about it as I prepare for the VBS season.

This year, our church isn’t actually having VBS (almost no students showed up last year) but we are having a Family Fun Fair, I’m the Bible center teacher, and this prep coincides with the weeks I’m supposed to be getting next year’s homeschool organized.  So far I have divided the year into sixths, noting that times heavy with co-oping can’t be as short as times we traditionally hunker down to the kitchen table.  Then I divided the chapters of work into sixths (after I finally found B’s grammar book, it was hiding in the car).  So now I need to think about the flow of a school day – what can we do together, are we really limited to mornings for my attention, afternoons for independent work?  Nap-time is still a fixture, but with K only waking once at night My nap is not quite the emergency priority that it was.

So, the future is cloudy but taking shape.  I’m not sure how to use my new learning to inform my plans ( I finally bought myself a copy of the Well Trained Mind, and downloaded some of Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer’s talks on MP3, so some paradymes of education are getting evaluated too) but I do know that reviewing the foundations to teach to children and strangers is … exciting.