By Debbie Richard
I would like to tell you a story about an 8-year-old girl.
Her parents did not go to church. The family loved the outdoors, so most weekends were spent camping.
Since both parents worked, the girl and her younger brother had to have a sitter. It so happened their sitter was the wife of a Baptist preacher. Every afternoon when their father picked them up, the preacher would meet him at the door and invite the family to church.
Now, this girl was a good little girl. She obeyed her parents, followed the rules, unlike her younger brother who thought rules were meant to be broken!
When it came time for Vacation Bible School, the girl and her brother went. It was there that the girl first heard that she was bad, just like her brother, no matter how much she obeyed the rules. She also learned that Jesus had come to take away all her sin. On Friday of VBS week, she accepted Jesus as her personal Savior.
She began to ask if the family could go to church. She asked for a Bible to read and began reading it each day even though she often did not understand what she read.
Finally, one day her father decided he would satisfy both his daughter and that Baptist preacher by taking the whole family to church – just once. It was there that he realized this preacher was preaching something different from what he had heard as a child. One week later he, too, accepted Christ as his Savior, and the mother and little brother soon followed. This changed the whole course of this family’s history.
The family became actively involved in their local church. Not many years later this family became missionaries.
The girl became a woman, went to a Christian college, and married a godly man. She and her husband served the Lord faithfully in local churches wherever God planted them. They had four children who also gave their hearts to Christ at a young age, and they became godly men and women.
They had six grandchildren, all of whom came to Christ at very early ages. Three of them accepted Christ as a result of Vacation Bible School.
When the grown-up girl and her husband neared retirement age God gave them a different calling. They sold their business and waited on the Lord’s next direction. They now serve as the pastor and his wife of a church.
I know this story well. I was that little girl.
Is Vacation Bible School worth it? I believe it is.
— Debbie Richard’s husband, Dan, is pastor of First Baptist Church, Pinewood.
