Highs and Lows

This week is Vacation Bible School at our church, and I'm in charge of telling the Bible stories. I have always loved VBS, especially getting all of the volunteers together. What a privilege to watch people come together to provide a fun week for our children! I directed program for a few years, and the best moment was when the building was humming, right around 10:30 Monday morning. If no one needed me at that time, then I knew I'd done my job and the rest of the week was cruise control. Oh, sure, there would be moments of crisis management, but I knew rotations were going well and everyone understood their jobs if I was in the volunteer breakroom chatting with people. It was the best high! It took weeks of preparation but always ended up being a huge reward.

This week I'm in the VBS trenches. One of the decisions I made regarding going back to school was that I would give up some of my volunteer activities. In the interest of starting to pull back and do less even before school starts I didn't direct VBS this year and just offered to teach the lesson, which actually requires very little in the way of advance preparation, maybe only 30 minutes each day.

And...I miss the high. I really wasn't prepared for that. I'm fine with teaching, perfectly comfortable with my storytelling role, but it just isn't the same. I wonder if I'll find anything like that feeling once I start school, or working with clients.