Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 July 2004 19:31:07
Vacation Bible School is over with. As is usual, the young adults who dutifully trooped down here from the heart of the Bible Belt --- hee, the buckle of the belt perhaps --- to help us with it, are all off in New Orleans being rewarded with touristy activities now.
Up in New Orleans--- we here are southwest of town. Or down in New Orleans--- some of the city is below sea level. Odd, that. You look up from whatever your business is, along the River, and see freighters full of foreign goods and steamboat paddlewheelers full of tourists floating by over your head.
It always makes me smile. It tickles me. We get these fresh-faced kids, 16, 18, 20, 22 years old. Some groups come to actually run the show, teach, lead the little kids in new songs and silly Bible games. Some simply come to assist while we, the local church, do the teaching.
Either way, the fresh bubbly little things come to us, and so many have never been to a town the size of ours that didn't have a church the "flavor" of ours on every streetcorner! We are practically a missionary area for them.
So we take them in and keep them in our homes and we all do the virturous churchy VBS thing, then we reward them with a trip to Sin City, the Big Easy, home of Bourbon Street and smoky jazz clubs and heaven knows what else.
It just tickles me, the whole process, all the incongruity. No, of course they're not getting into anything wrong up in New Orleans today. It's just the idea. Makes me giggle.
Louisiana is really, at heart, a banana republic, anyway. It's as good as a mission trip down to South America, but with less malaria.