At Least the Decorations Look Good

Pin It If you've been clicking fruitlessly on my "Day's End" blog, wondering why I've been hovering at the precipice of Blog Earth, the truth is, I'm not a bad blogger, I'm just a really absorbed Vacation Bible School Director who has discovered that she no longer knows how to multi-task.





VBS began today (er...that'll be yesterday tomorrow). I can measure my summer thus far in blocks of time: bathroom remodel, Tennessee, visit with Dad, Nationals (yay, Autumn!), three weeks of VBS prop and set design, and now VBS Week. Summer is really kind of slithering away too quickly for me to relax and settle into it the way I'd like to, too slick for me grasp hold of it and just inhale. I'm reeling from "vacation" to "vacation," making it from day to day, and now it' already VBS. It's here. Which is good, which is great...don't get me wrong--I love VBS. Just really, at times, sometimes...a body just wants to curl up and read another body's blog, you know? Or maybe stroke out at the pool. That's all.

But it's VBS week. So picture me doing the aidiadiadiadiadiadaa head spin thingy (who does that, anyway? Is it Chester Cheetah?) and getting my head on straight. Okay. It's there. Kinda.



VBS Week is always a Really Big Deal around these parts. I apologize for the caps, but VBS Week kind of warrants them in my life. I've directed it at my little country church for several many years, and it's a big evangelistic event, even for a small church. There are so many witnessing opportunities, and so many lives that are reached through it, year and year. I love being a part of it.





But after building a hundred or so polystyrene rocks, a covered wagon, and a nice little western tableau with a ranch entrance, evergreens, and a howling coyote, I'm thinking I probably should've postponed that whole healthy eating thing. Caffeine sounds pretty good right about now. We even have a horse roped to a hitching post. Very cute, our decorations.





Our kids are pretty cute, too. We had a great little group of them, sitting expectantly in the pews chitter-chattering away while I attempted to keep from pulling my hair out at the roots ten minutes after the Worship Rally was supposed to have begun. Parents sat in the back rows, their foreheads furrowed with the "wasn't this show supposed to have started?" query.





It's a truth that I hold to be self-evident that if something can go wrong with your computer, it's going to go wrong on Day One of VBS. Even if it didn't go wrong during your dry run the day before. Or the Sunday before when you used it for Children's Church. But when you have the pews packed full of a captive audience and the clock is ticking, it's going to happen.





We run a powerpoint with Worship Rally that flashes slides of the song lyrics, plus a dvd that helps the kids learn the accompanying motions to the songs. It's our visual hymnal. Without it, we're pretty much sunk. In our dry run yesterday, the sound tech was having difficulty reading the sound off of my computer, so decided to use a different computer--no problem. Today, however, the LCD projecter wouldn't sync with that computer. Solution: send a runner the two miles down the road for my computer and forgo the DVD motions. We'd wing that part--as long as the lyrics were on the screen, we could teach the motions and be fine.





Only it was taking a little longer than anticipated for the computer to actually arrive and I was running out of material to keep my audience entertained. I'd done everything I could think of that we didn't actually need the computer for...the pledges, the motto, the verse, ...I was so frazzled though, that I'd forgotten all the important stuff. Like, "Hey, guys. It's so awesome you're here. I'm Ms. Lori, in case you're a visitor and you have no clue who this strange woman about to blow a gasket up here in front of you is. I'm usually much cooler but these are extenuating circumstances."





And then there was the child who didn't want to come out of the bounce house.





Extenuating circumstances, indeed.





At least the decorations look good.