The potter and the clay

What do you see when you see this image?

Do you see butterflies, clouds, sunlight?

How about opportunity, hope, Gospel?

Every year Elkhorn Church of Christ has the opportunity to host Vacation Bible School. The theme this year was God’s Big Back Yard. In addition we have a group from Alabama come to Elkhorn, Wisconsin to help staff this one week event. We generally like having one staff member for every five kids.

The Alabama group usually brings between 30-40 people every year, which is good considering all the preparation that need to be made the night before our opening. If you brake the preparation down by hours per person we spent 400 hours in preparation.

The first day is always the hardest especially for my group “Pre-K”. There has not been one year that the kids in my class don’t haven’t scream there lungs out because mommy and daddy left them. I am the only one of the teachers in my group has dealt with this every year, because I always have different helpers for every year. However I have discovered that if one child chooses to be involved this makes the other kid time away from there parents that much easier.

This past year I had that kind of child, She was used to being away from her parents because she attended day care every day of the week. whenever we would sing, she would always want to sing her favorite song “Jesus Loves Me”. Oh how adorable she was and how much easier it made things for me to have the other kids involved. The more she would sing the more they would sing. Of course not all wanted to sing and some didn’t even want to be there but by the end of the week I could say that changed a lot of lifes.

I am truly happy to have met such a energetic, enthusiastic, and song loving child. I am not sure if she new that she was whorshiping God but I do know that she loved doing it. And because of her, others who did not want to be there to became my best friends.

I have learned a very important lesson from this little that I don’t think I will ever forget. This lesson comes from James 3:5 which says: “Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark”. To me that tells me that it only takes a spark to start a fire, that one little girl singing can start can bring others to know Christ.

So back to the picture, when I look at this picture I see oppertunity, hope, Gospel. The Gospel is what drives me and by this oppertunity, I can give these children hope, and it started with one little girl singing her favorite song “Jesus Loves Me”.