Each year Alaska's Wrangell Church members conduct Vacation Bible School throughout Alaska as part of their church outreach. The summer of 2018 was full of mountaintop experiences and low valleys.
First the mountaintops: The team was blessed to reconnect with old friends in communities that we have been visiting for a while and see the children growing. At one of the locations, the group was told about one of the boys who left with his parents on Sabbath after VBS church. As he got into the car and on the drive home, he told his parents, “We forgot to pray.” His parents were perplexed at first. After a few minutes, they realized that the boy had been listening to the sermon where the pastor spoke of praying in a car.
And then there were the valleys. After five years of doing VBS, the Wrangell team faced a challenge they had never encountered. What do you do when no kids show up? To say the team was disappointed would be an understatement. While there are possibly many reasons for the lack of participation, none of them mattered. What did matter is that the theme for 2018 — Prayer Warriors — suddenly took on new meaning for the team. Each night every member was at the church praying, singing and even laughing. It wasn’t easy to do all this in the midst of disappointment.
There are still many questions as to why the children did not come and not many answers. What the team learned is failure or success, in man’s eyes, does not matter. What does matter is keeping faithful to God’s calling no matter the outcome.
Wrangell Church VBS team members (from left) Tiffany Eilertsen, Jackie Eilertsen, Charlie Meigs, Brooke Reynolds, Sam Eilertsen and Dena Meigs consider VBS an outreach to other communities.
Children attend the Wrangell-sponsored VBS.
