Last night was another successful night of VBS! I didn’t get a chance to write last night because by the time all the kids were in bed and all the nightly chores were done, it was BED TIME. It’s hard to measure the success of a VBS because there are so many benchmarks you could measure it by. Do you measure it by the number of kids in attendance? How many visitors were invited? The money collected for offering? Or is there something else that was should be looking for or measuring?
Stacey Lindell helping Mallory with her bracelet.
One of the discussions we had in our teaching time with the 4th grade class was about how kids spend their free time. The goal of the lesson was to live out Colossians 3:23, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men”. Most of the kids in the class were thinking through how they could spend their time to honor Christ with their lives. There was one little girl who turned the question on me. The root of her question was this, how should adults spend their time and how much should adults be focused on their job vs. spending time with their children. I could tell the question was asked out of her personal experiences. My opinion was there was a longing for her parents to spend more time with her, rather than be consumed with work, their job and their career.
The balance between work and personal life is a challenge for most parents I know. Too much energy and time spent in either direction can lead to trouble later down the road. Too much time with family spent at the expense of completing assignments and doing your job could ultimately lead to you losing your job. Too much time at work and building your career at the expense of your family could lead you to losing your family! The answer to these difficult questions is balance, and that’s exactly what I told this 4th grade girl during VBS last night.
But the moral of the story is not balance in the Christian life, rather it’s that our kids desire and long for our attention. They crave time to be spent “playing”. They want to share experiences with us. Our children want to know they are loved and one of the best ways we can show them this love is through the time we spend with them. Children in today’s culture have a major deficit of quality time with adults, specifically with their parents. We all need to take time away from our laptops, TVs, video games, and other time-wasting things and spend time with our children.
So another night of VBS is done. Let’s get back to the original question. How do we measure the success of a VBS? I believe our greatest success is the time we volunteers spend with the children and out of that time, kids at VBS this year know they are loved. It can be as simple as have a listening ear as a Kindergartener talks about their Bakugan cards, or a 5th grader talk about their latest math competition. VBS is a time that we listen to kids, play with kids and through that we build a foundation to share Jesus Christ. And when Christ is shared and experienced, that’s a successful VBS!
