I'm posting the words of the prayer I used yesterday in the service from Valley of Vision, a book of prayers which I cannot recommend highly enough as a guide to prayer (several had asked after the service).

O LORD,

In prayer I launch far out into the eternal world, and on that broad ocean my soul triumphs over all evils on the shores of mortality.

Time, with its frivolous amusements and cruel disappointments, never appears so inconsiderate as then.

In prayer I see myself as nothing; I find my heart going after thee with intensity, and long with vehement thirst to live to thee.

Blessed be the strong gales of the Spirit that speed me on my way to the New Jerusalem.

In prayer all my worldly cares, fears, and anxieties disappear, and are of as little significance as a puff of wind.

In prayer my soul inwardly exults with lively thoughts at what thou are doing for thy church, and I long that thou shouldest get thyself a great name from sinners returning to Zion.

In prayer, I am lifted above the frowns and flatteries of life, and taste heavenly joys; entering into the eternal world, I can give myself to thee with all my heart, to be thine forever.

In prayer I can place all my concerns in thy hands, to be entirely at thy disposal, having no will or interest of my own.

In prayer I can intercede for my friends, ministers, sinners, the church, thy kingdom to come, with greatest freedom, ardent hopes,

as a son to his father,

as a lover to the beloved.

Help me to be all prayer and never to cease praying.

Above is a picture of a Vacation Bible Club held by our church in 1948 and directed by the Pastor's wife, Mrs. Charles Massey

I'm also including excerpts from an article from the August 17th Wall Street Journal about Children's summer programs like our Backyard Bible Club which someone handed to me yesterday. It is longish and I may not agree with everything I read here, but it's a reminder of how outsiders may be reached. (You may be able to read all of the original article here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110010484)

Vacationing with Jesus

by Jennifer Graham

There comes a time in every mother’s life when she has to make a decision to save herself and her loved ones, even if it means taking a leap of faith. There comes a time for Vacation Bible School.

The large signs beckon from every suburban church. Free baby-sitting, they whisper. All week! It is a seductive pitch, directed at frazzled parents desperate to entertain their bored offspring as the summer drags on.

A refuge for frazzled parents,

an opportunity for churches

Vacation Bible School, or VBS, differs by denomination, but churches that offer it share a common goal: to expose children to the Gospel, and maybe, just maybe, recruit their families into the church. For Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., VBS is the most effective tool of evangelism, the impetus for 26% of baptisms in 2006. Nearly three million children and adults attended VBS at Southern Baptist churches last year, resulting in 94,980 “decisions to receive Christ as Savior” and 280,693 “Sunday School prospects discovered,” according to Southern Baptist Convention statisticians “Vacation Bible School is today’s revival,” said Jerry Wooley, the VBS specialist for LifeWay, the SBC’s publishing agency.

Vacation Bible School was the brainchild of a Mrs. D.T. Miles, wife of a Methodist minister in Hopedale, Illinois. Mrs. Miles, it is said, was concerned that the children of her husband’s congregation weren’t learning enough on Sundays and needed a month-long course of study over the summer. The first session, in 1884, had 37 students. Like its modern-day counterparts, it included arts and crafts, singing, exercise, drama and Bible study . . .

Chapel Hill United Methodist Church, in Chapel Hill, Tenn., has 150 members, and for them, VBS was a budget-breaking expense. At $1,000, it “is one of our highest funded pro- grams,” said Jenny Youngman, the wife of the pastor. The investment paid off: Chapel Hill's program, held July 22 to 26, drew 55 children each evening and resulted in three new families attending church the next weekend.

VBS often begins or ends with a party—as simple as a family worship service with refreshments afterward, or as elaborate as a carnival with pony rides. During the course of the week, children may go on field trips, and they often take home T-shirts, CDs, hats, bracelets and videos. Usually all of this is free, while a week at other camps can cost $250 or more. . . .

Glynis Jaszewski, a Roman Catholic who lives in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., sent her two children to Vacation Bible Schools at Protestant churches without qualms. “When I was working, they would always go to two or three of them in the summer; it was day care,” Mrs. Jaszewski said. She believes their generic Christian message doesn’t vary much, even across denominational lines. . . .

Mrs. Youngman, the pastor’s wife, said churches welcome any child to VBS, whatever the parents’ intent. “If we can connect with just one family, it’s worth it,” she said.

Ms. Graham is a writer in the suburbs of Boston.

This will seem quite a different blog, so I've left several days in between posts (sure, that's why I did it.) Last Wednesday was a day of culture for Deb and I. We ended the evening at the Hatch Shell in Boston beside the Charles River with a free concert by the Landmarks Orchestra with stars from the upcoming Boston Lyric Opera performances of Abduction from the Seraglio (early Mozart opera about which Schaeffer has the king of Prussia say "too many notes." It's all Turkish sounding music [remember that Muslims were surrounding and threatening Vienna much of those days--Muslim clothing fashions and music were all the rage]), The Elixir of Love by Donizetti (typical opera of the late Romantic error, frivolous, with some lovely singing) and Puccini's La Boheme, one of my favorites of all time--it snows on stage in the second act. It's the typical opera thing where the female is sick with what is likely consumption (that was the fashionable operatic disease to die of, as did Violetta in La Traviata) and the young man in the dark tries to help her find her key, and touches her cold hand and tells her his life story and falls in love with a woman who is dying of not being able to breathe and sings about it for two more hours.

Oh, but it is wonderful. It was one of the first opera recordings I owned, when I sent away to Columbia Music Club: you got this set free but you had to buy 10 more in a year. I played it and played it. Rudolpho (who falls in love with the expiring Mimi) was sung by the young Pavarotti. In the opera, unlike the movie version of Rent which is based loosely [maybe the word I'm looking for is rudely or inelegantly] on the same story, Mimi actually dies, but after some wonderful music. The singers were quite good, but the soprano was, to my ears, the most consistent and best. All three, uncharacteristically for opera singers, were very gracious and encouraging to each other and wonderfully in character (though not costume). Every night a free classical concert with an above average orchestra--hard to beat. Easily accessible by way of Alewife (down Route 2) by way of the Red Line (Charles/NGH stop). We arrived at 6:45 for the 7:00 concert with only our blanket and had not trouble finding a front row seat (we got back to Alewife by 9:39pm).

The earlier part of the day was spent at the Museum of Fine Art. NOTE: Wednesday nights, thanks to some bank or other, are free, at least this summer. Too good a treat to miss. many famous paintings like this of Monet. And a wonderful collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Hokusai's Tidal Wave is there but not yet on exhibit (at least, I couldn't find it--there is an upcoming exhibit on Japanese art that is in process).

And many wonderful surprises like this by the English painter John Martin of the seventh plague (hail). Note Moses with the rod and Aaron at the lower left. Martin used archeological sketches newly available in his day to create an accurate setting to show the power of this massive and advanced civilization, over whom Yahweh still rules.

It was also interesting to me to see biblical references in Latin in the musical instrument room which were untranslated by the exhibit, though it seemed every other non-English word in the museum was translated. "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord" on this clavichord.

"Praise Him with loud sounding cymbals" on this spinet harpsichord. (I'm guessing here; I'm no Latin scholar.)

We had to buy tickets to see the Edward Hopper Exhibit, which is soon gone. Hopper, like Stephen Sondheim, is very good at pointing out the idiosyncracies of our society but, also like Sondheim, not as good at suggesting answers. He spent two summers in Maine with his wife (of 44 years--she was also an artist and died nine months after he did in 1967) where he painted his famous lighthouses.

But more significant were his glimpses into city life. Living in Washington Square in New York City (only a couple of blocks from Cooper Union, where our son Josh attends), he would paint pictures of people that you'd likely glimpse as you'd pass by on an elevated train or see from a distance. People who don't know they've been seen. Kind of an exposed anonymity. You see it on the subway a lot, people reading, earphones in, isolated by the company of others. Each Hopper painting is tantalyzingly "the suggestion of enigmatic narratives," but you don't know what should happen next or what came before, the people are oddly the kind of memory you would take away from a glance in a lit window of a building, they are almost faceless, blank. Here, see a couple framed by the gray window of their city apartment. The husband is just home from work, having taken off his suit coat, and is already engrossed in the newspaper. His wife sits, as the exhibit says, "desultorily," plucking away at the piano. She is dressed in an evening gown. Has she been at home all day and is now dressed for going out, but her husband has come home and is in his own little world? We can't know, but we do know there is a story here, that draws us in.

Hopper shows us "the solitariness of individuals, even when in one another's company." In Nighthawks, see how distant each person looks, even the sugar, napkins, salt and pepper reinforce the isolation.

Or in New York Movie, see the movie screen and off to the side, the usherette lost in a reverie about her life (reflective of or inspired by what she sees in the movie?).

Or this etching, from above, to bring out the stark loneliness of the solitary man walking.

Artists have so poignantly, in modern times, shown the flaws, the idiosycracies, they've become mirrors that have allowed us to examine in us what we don't normally see, but when we see through the artist's eyes, we can say "Oh, I know that feeling. I've seen that, felt that, know that . . . " But a diagnosis is not enough. Nor are there simple disneyland/crystal cathedral answers that ignore the reality of a sin-broken world, as do the platitudinous answers most Christian books today offer ("Jesus is the super-economy sized best brand--buy Him®--He's better than all the other products."). The Bible is much wiser than either the useless and gnawing pessimism or unsettled groundlessness of our present modern times. It points to the seriousness of the Tower of Babel brokeness and the brutality of the cross necessary to bring real community. Real community doesn't so much grow out of spending time together doing happy things but, rather, really knowing who Jesus has shown Himself to be, serving Him together, suffering together for him, and serving each other as He did us. Those are the times that He works in us all that marvelous Day of Pentecost wildness that undoes the Babel curse, that we once again, if only intermittently until we are Home (but truly) share mystic sweet commmunion, beat out in the blast furnace of this world, as we see that the faith He has begun in us is pure gold and this time on earth is for the refining of that gold. Hopper has eloquently seen the problem, drawn the poison to the surface; Jesus has bought the medicine, applied the prescription that heals (not the bandage we prefer that hides and allows the untreated wound to poison the rest of who we are). A wonderfully thoughtful day in the real world.

Having sent you all to Nick's photos, all that remains is for me to send you two last shots, the first being that of the ever patient, ever willing, Pastor Greer on the Friday penguin revealing to which I've alluded in earlier posts. I wish you could have seen the looks on the faces of the surprised kids who may have been expecting someone else.

But, I must tell you, when it came to Nick Ware's attire, I just had no idea. On the internet, I chanced upon the obviously untouched picture below of a mannequin dressed as Nick and looking remarkably like him, almost close enough to be his double, in the window of this very "in" store in England. I always knew he was a trend setter. But what you may not know is that Nick, with the assistance of Blair McKee, will be the new Senior High Youth Group Leader this fall.

This will be the last of my posts on Backyard Bible Club, and I think that I may spend some time sharing my thoughts on the ways that Christians can be involved as change agents in our society from several new books I've been thinking through, one of which is Dick Staub's The Culturally Savvy Christian. I don't always agree with his theology, but he has some superb points to make. And, I'll offer my summaries of more of Newton's letters.

Harry Walker, one of the missionaries with which we've been involved for years, will be preaching this Sunday on "What It Takes to be a Missionary," and Paul Crompton, Bryan Crompton, myself, Barbara Ortler (on harpsichord), and a dear friend of mine, Laura Finkelstein (on flute), will be playing the second movement from the Second Brandenburg Concerto by Bach. Laura will also play an Andante in C Major by Mozart and a Presto by Johann Joachim Quantz, a superb musician who played oboe and flute with equal talent, well known in his day, but generally only known by flautists today.

Oh, dear Backyard Bible Club fans, Nick Ware has done us all a great service and has put up ALL his pictures from the club at a place where all can find them. Why, this is better than a blog. Go here to find them . . . http://waterworks.shutterfly.com

Nick confided to me that he never could come up with a name for Waterworks, though he says he considered Hose-B (to go with Paul Crompton's Hose-ay). In case you don't remember him, I've enclosed a picture of him recently in Southern California which shows the lengths to which he goes to get a good picture:

Once again, alas, I must apologize for the fuzziness of the picture but, after all, Nick wasn't doing the photography, so it's just a little out of focus. Way to hang five, Nick! Also, I will do my best to get a picture up that shows Nick in his Friday ensemble: truly, unmatched shirt and Hawaiian pants, well, it was sartorial splendiferousness. I couldn't even have hoped, on my pinkest day, to outshine his effulgence (yes, that's really a word).

Uncle Pinky

Today's installment is a collage of balloon volleyball pictures. I love seeing where the water balloon is and seeing everybody's eyes intent upon it.

Wednesday night I hope to post . . . why adults should not be allowed too close to hoses . . . except, of course, for Hose-ay . . .

So many pictures to remember the week by! I've included some here and will post some more tomorrow. But, before then, I better get the truth of it all off my chest!

And here are just some of the many bubble episodes. All of the pictures will be up somewhere soon, and then you can find your favorites there.

Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh Friday!

What a day of surprises. And what a day of so many photographs taken that I won't be able to finish this blog until tomorrow.

The day began when I, still recovering from the Rocket Sled injuries told Sven how Paul was obedient to God in how to treat others even when they were those who were taking him to his death:

Then, determined to ask Pickles' forgiveness, I was ambushed from behind by Pickles, held in place by Sven, and made to swallow a Koolickle. And, as the sequence shows, it wasn't so bad; it was actually quite good.

Turns out the the only known antidote for the fatal disease I had contracted down in Antarctica is a Koolickle and Pickles had been following me to save my life. We quickly administered Koolickles (which the kids had prepared on Tuesday morning) to all the kids who had been exposed to me this week. (I'll put the recipe, if you dare, in the next post, though it is available in many places on the internet).

Then we went on to our snack for the day, storm battered boats (as Paul's) and island footprints (where Paul and his centurian landed).

More Saturday, when I have time to digest all of the pictures . . .

Uncle Pinky

Oh, the Thursday of it all! In my endless quest for pickle purity, I had ordered and received the "Speedy Rocket Sled" from the Acme Corporation. Here is Sven putting it together (you can see the box it came in, in the foreground.

With this beauty, I might hope to catch the precocious Pygoscelis papua. Ah, the jet pack worked just fine: see my smoke:

Sadly the pictures are fuzzy (reminiscent of the UFO pictures of my youth), yet if you look very closely (maybe crossing your eyes might help) you can see me fly by in my hat with a little bit of my hair showing:

Yet, this model of Speedy Rocket Sled sadly was unequipped with brakes. The crash was painful, though Sven and Hydroboy carried me off to Lowell General. Since I couldn't tell the Bible story this morning, Heathcliffe and Gertrude (after a stern talking to from Puddles) had to tell about the follower of Jesus named Peter and how Jesus forgave him and gave him a job, caring for Christians.

And they did a fine job, after some of the kids encouraged them on. About how after Jesus was killed, his followers had been fishing all night without success when a strange man from the shore (Peter figured out pretty quickly that it was Jesus) told them where to put down their nets. And they caught a load so heavy they couldn't put it in the boat:

And then, as Peter had learned to turn to Jesus for his strength, Jesus called him to serve Him in a new way:

In my absence, Puddles sent everyone on to crafts including finishing the towels from the first day:

Finishing the stained glass bottles:

AND making plaster of paris copies of our feet!

The snacks reminded us of Peter's time with Jesus on the beach, a net of rainbowed color goldfish, and vanilla pudding beaches with gummi fish:

Games just reminded us of water as we shot balloons up into the air for balloon volleyball (Can you spot the balloon in each of these pictures? Don't miss the expressions on the kids' faces!).

But pickleanimous danger was never far away! What could this photo possibly mean? I must speak to Puddles right away!

The hospital allowed me to come back to teach one song at the end, but, oh, it was painful. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Uncle Pinky

Breaking news for 4th through 6th graders. In all the fuss, I totally forgot about the challenge verse, so I've made it easier than in the past. It's 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, words written down by Paul, about whom we'll hear on Friday morning. You may use any translation of the Bible you like, especially if you've already memorized it before.

And, yes, memorize these verses and recite them and you may throw a whipped cream pie in the face of the counselor of your choice on Friday IF YOU HAVE ALSO MEMORIZED ALL THE OTHER VERSES. And, of course, counselors are allowed to memorize, too.