Vacation Bible School

More properly, The Vacation Bible School Fiasco. I say "fiasco" because I'm sure it was for the people running the school.

I try to picture the experience from their perspective. Two heathen children [twins! which has got to be a sin, somehow] of around, oh, age 10ish, show up one summer who have -- really -- NO CLUE WHATSOEVER about this Christianity stuff. No, really. Really. It's difficult to picture in America but squint hard and bear with me. No. Clue.

Not having any idea what we were getting into at the time, when Matt asked us if we wanted to go, we shrugged and said, "Sure".

So, heathen godless children, who've never seen the inside of Sunday School in their entire heathen godless little lives, much less know what Sunday School is, show up at this place for "vacation bible school".

We're going to pray to Jesus, now. Bow your heads.

Come again?

Jesus Christ, our lord and savior.

Jesus Christ? Wait, you mean, that guy my stepdad yells at when he hits his thumb with a hammer?

And we're going to what, pray to him? What's that?

Well, you ask him for stuff.

Why?

Does he have stuff? Why would he have stuff? He's dead. And this is a dead guy from 2000 years ago -- it's not like they had TVs back then.

You people are engaged in a bunch of seemingly useless acts.

Every time someone opened their mouths it was to inform us heathen godless children of some new, frankly incomprehensible, fact, that apparently made perfect sense to them. Being moderately bright children growing up in not the full-tilt boonies, but out in the woods -- we knew from experience that dead stuff doesn't come back to life. It stays dead, decomposes, and there's a gross smell. So, this coming back after three days business, oh, that just reeks of some "zombie" episode from The Twilight Zone. Pun intended.

What I remember about the experience best is the sense of utter and total confusion about the whole thing. There's this big old guy with a long white beard who lives up in the clouds -- well, where does he go when it's not cloudy, then? And then this dead guy stapled to some big sticks who died for my "sin" things. Bad stuff, only I haven't done the bad stuff yet, and it's not at all clear why he should get punished for my bad stuff.

This makes no sense.

And could someone please explain why I'm cutting fish out of construction paper? For children who've internalized the ideas of conservation of mass and energy at a tender age -- the tales of loaves and fishes sound like sheer fantasy. Or science fiction. I mean this is the point at which I'm liable to open my heathen godless little mouth and say "you people are making this up, aren't you"?

Pretty much the only thing I recall us being good at was memorizing bits of this Bible thing -- although I do recall being concerned that since I didn't understand everything we were being told to parrot, I might accidentally say something not entirely true. And I may not get this sin business, but lying? That's wrong.