Page Onorato, writing in The Dispatch from North Carolina, remembers Vacation Bible School. What are your memories? Do you have VBS at your church?
Local churches are gearing up for Bible School – banners waving, sign-up lists posted, preachers encouraging attendance from their pulpits everywhere. Here’s my version, from a column written a few years back.
Just when I was getting used to lazy days of swimming, reading and playing out after supper, my mother would announce, “Bible School starts tomorrow; lucky you, your grandmother signed you up to go.”
“Do I have to? Please don’t make me go this year,” I begged. My little Episcopal church had too few youthful parishioners to warrant a summer session, so my religious education was furthered each July by my granny’s First Methodist persuasion.
I, who didn’t even know the words to the table blessing “God is Great” or the hymn “The Old Rugged Cross” until I was 11 years old (Episcopalians speak a different language), felt like an alien from Planet X at the gatherings. (more here)
……
Here’s a short quiz for Bible school graduates, all about food.
1. What was the forbidden fruit?
2. What was Esau’s mess of “pottage” made of?
3. What two foods did God send the children of Israel.
4. How old were Moses and Aaron when they led the Israelites to the land of milk and honey?
5. How many baskets of scraps were collected after Jesus fed the multitudes on five loaves and two fishes?
6. What feast was prepared for the Prodigal Son?
7. What did Noah and the gang eat during their 40 days on the ark?
Answers below:
1. Gotcha if you said apple. The Bible doesn’t tell, just that it was from the Tree of Knowledge.
2. Lentils
3. You know manna, for sure, but did you remember the quails that came up in the evening and covered the camp?
4. Moses was 80 and Aaron, 83, mere babes in Biblical times.
5. Twelve, according to John and seven if you believe Matthew.
6. The fatted calf, which must have tasted pretty good to him after living on swill leftover by the swine he’d been herding.
7. Every sort of food that was eaten, probably two of each.
Page H. Onorato is a retired teacher.