It was the last day of our week of VBS and it has been a good one. The weather cooperated. We have had a good group of children. Mike, our Director of Christian Education outdid himself in the planning and preparation and it has paid off. He has done a great job each day with the lessons and shepherding the energy of the older group. My friend Susan and I have had the younger group which was one child larger than the older group. Today we went to the Zoo and then it was over for another year.
While I am tempted to say that this is my LAST VBS, it is certainly possible that as a member of another church in the coming years, I might readily agree to help, so I think I should not make that claim. I was so touched when I heard that Aiden asked his mother if I would come back next summer to help with VBS. I do enjoy being with them and in the course of just a few days you can see them grow in their ability to be in a group. This is especially true with the younger ones because we have 3 who will be going into Kindergarten in the fall. The first day was a bit rough but they settled into our routine.
What struck me this year for the first time is how difficult it is for them to focus on a real person and what that person is saying or teaching, but the minute the computer comes on or we are projecting a movie or some of the curriculum that comes in DVD form, they are rapt in their attention. There is something about the flickering screen that is far more attractive than a real person. While I understand some of this focus, I also find it problematic.
The faith we proclaim originated primarily out of an oral culture. The stories were passed from person to person by word of mouth. You can see it in the repetition of the stories and in the poetry of the Psalms. People paid attention to the village story teller and absorbed what they were saying. What are we losing when we lose the enfleshed interaction of communication?
I worry about our over digitized age. The teenagers are all plugged into their iPods which means then don’t have to talk to one another. I see them waiting for the bus in our neighborhood with no human interaction. They use e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, (and probably things I don’t even know about) to communicate rather than the more risky face to face encounter. Perhaps I’m becoming as an article this week in the Globe called a Digital Dinosaur. Just the fact that I read a newspaper on paper rather than on line makes me part of a vanishing species!
I just hope that what the children remember is not just the videos we watched but the interactions on the playground and the quiet conversations over lunch and on the playground bench, and the fact the three adults spent a week just with them because we think they are important.
