Vacation Bible School Our family attended Pleasant Prairie Baptist Church for years. Last Fall, with broken hearts, we left that church. It was a terrible time for our family. It was hard losing our church home, but we felt that we could not stay there any longer. Before the dust had settled, over half the church membership had scattered...settling down in many other congregations. We were the first family to leave the church and one of the last to find a new church home. Though we visited somewhere every Sunday, it took eight long discouraging months before we finally found a church that we believed God was leading us to join. Bible Baptist was smaller than we had intended on settling down in, and it was an independent Baptist Church rather than a Southern Baptist church...but, it felt like home and it had a strong AWANA program on Wednesday evenings for the kids. But, just seven weeks after we joined, a scandal rocked that church and within eight days, the church membership decided to dissolve the fellowship, lock up the doors, and sell the building. We were shell shocked. I have never seen a church implode so quickly and so completely before. Once again, we were without a church home.

Too discouraged to begin searching anew for a church home, we simply decided NOT to look for a church home right away, but, just to make Freeman Baptist Church our home base until we had the umph to begin the search once more. (It was just so discouraging not knowing from week to week where we would visit next. We decided not to visit anywhere...just to settle into Freeman for a while...until we were ready to renew the search again. The pastor at Freeman is exceptional. Probably the thing that kept us from considering joining it back before we joined Bible Baptist was that it didn't have an AWANA program for the kids to attend.)


Today, Freeman Baptist began their Vacation Bible School. Darcy, Doug, and Rayna had a good time at VBS today! And it is giving them a chance to get to know some of the other children in the church. Since we don't live in Freeman, everyone is new to them.

Freeman is a teeny, tiny town down the highway from our teeny, tiny town. Since it is in such a small town and is a small congregation, and since they didn't put up any sign out front (as most churches do) to advertise their VBS, I was amazed at how many children came....SEVENTY-FIVE on the very first day!
Their theme is "Rambing Road Trip". Darcy, Doug and Rayna are enjoying learning the new songs and doing crafts and games. Somehow, I got drafted to be the photographer for the week. I am enjoying that! It gives me license to wander about where-ever I want and pop in on any of the classes and hang out taking photos for as long as I want! I had fun peeking in on all three of my kids and getting to see what they were up to! After the kids and I got back home today, I loaded all my photos up on the computer and touched them up a bit, then put them in order for a "slide show" for the kids to watch tomorrow as they gather in the sanctuary waiting for the VBS day to begin. (Like so many churches these days, this little church has a large drop down screen coupled with a computer driven projector.)  ¶ 7/25/2005 07:52:00 PM