Big God

I am so sore. My lower back is screaming at me. My neck is tight. My calves are fatigued. Even my elbows hurt (that one I can't figure out).

I didn't do a long swim. I didn't run a marathon. I haven't been on my bike. I spent about 20 hours this week with a group of six kids at Vacation Bible School. And I'm more exhausted than if I did all of those previously mentioned athletic endeavors in one day.

I've decided that Vacation Bible School is not for the faint of heart. It is (and was) an incredible experience that I really enjoyed. I had the greatest group of kids. The worship aspect of it was amazing-adults can take a big lesson from kids in terms of how to worship and mean it.

That said, it's an absolutely draining experience.

But all worthwhile things are draining. Running a race. Creating a garden. Giving birth. And while I'm absolutely beat, it's 1:00 a.m. and I decided to post about VBS. Even though I'm drained, I can't stop thinking about what a great experience it was. So I needed to unload my brain.

The thing that I learned this week is that kids totally get how big God is. Andy Stanley has a preaching line I love: "How big is your God?" He asks this rhetorical question when he preaches about how people limit God, when they express doubt that their life, their physical condition, their financial health, can ever change. When we express that kind of doubt, we limit God.

Kids don't do that. They get that God is huge and can do anything. When my campers walked through the parted Red Sea today (blue tarp strung from the ceiling, with toy fish on the ground and teenagers spraying water from small holes in the tarp), their big eyes and their lips making perfectly round "Os" was a physical sign to me that they got how big God is. They asked me how God actually parted the Red Sea. Of course, I told them that I don't know, a perfectly acceptable answer to any question that begins, "how did God . . ." They never asked me "did God really do that?"

We adults take that beautiful child belief in God and dilute it over time, becoming cynical about God's power, if we ever even take His power into account. Even if we don't say it, we often act as if God is too small or impotent or disinterested to help us.

In the back of my mind, I had doubts that we could effectively handle 270+ children from ages 3-9 and help them worship God in a corporate setting while having one-on-one interaction within our small groups. But it happened. One of my campers told me today, "thank you, Miss Kathleen, for being my crew leader. I had so, so, so, so, fun!" (I'm pretty sure he meant it was so fun, not so-so fun).

How big is my God? Huge. I just forget how big sometimes.