VBS

Vacation Bible School is a busy time.

One month later… or more

So maybe I procrastinated a little bit this time on the blog, but we’re still alive, and still on the road.  We’ve been busy since leaving Hawaii, visiting many places and people, and preparing for this current journey we’re on: Summer Tour! 

After leaving Hawaii, we came home for a little week-long break from rocking the world.  After a slight rejuvenation, we came back to begin the last section of our yearlong term with Youth Encounter.  We started with Vasa, MN.  This was our third visit to the church, the first two being once at the very beginning, and once right before leaving for PNG.  Since they were our prep-church before going to PNG, we got to come back and let them be the first ones to personally hear the stories from all of us.  We did some debriefing sessions as a team about our overseas tour, and what we expected for the remaining months together.  From there we went up to Remer, Minnesota, to Luther Dell, our starting place in August, for a week or Vacation Bible School preparation.  It was a great chance to see the other international teams and be in an isolated community before busting out again with acoustic guitars and djembes blazing.  We had a four day break for Memorial Day weekend before rejoining as teams to head out to our first official booking for the summer.  I hung out with a friend from Watermark Denmark and his family in Wisconsin.  After regrouping, we drove to Prairie du Chein, Wisconsin, for a program at a prison.  It was the same prison we visited in September.  We had a wonderful time worshiping with the men there, and they really seemed to connect with everything we did.  It was another great experience for us.  After the program, we left and drove an hour to our host homes for the night in Onalaska, WI.  The next night we did a family night program (concert) for the church in Onalaska.  The next day we traveled to North Aurora, Illinois, just west of Chicago.  We will be back at that church by the end of this week for VBS, so it was cool to actually meet them and go over what we would be doing with them before we go there later.  The rest of our bookings we do VBS with won’t be as luxurious as this time.  Luckily it is our first one, so it will help us ease into the summer I think.  After leaving North Aurora, we went to my house!  So I was pretty excited to see family and friends, and Dana, who just returned from Europe after studying in Bristol since mid-January.  We spent the weekend in Blissfield, for Amber’s graduation and Sunday worship in Adrian, and then set off for the next stop in Kent City near Grand Rapids.  From there we started our one-night stops around Lake Michigan, visiting Petoskey, Ishpeming, and Ewen, Michigan.  Then we continued our one-nighters in Tomahawk and Black Earth, Wisconsin before arriving today in North Aurora for the second time in a week and a half.  We’ll be here all week for their Vacation Bible School, which starts our first of eight VBS weeks that we get to help out with around the eastern U.S.

While we were making our week-long daily travel around Lake Michigan, we got to share a lot of things about Papua New Guinea and Hawaii and the many things we experienced.  We have a lot of fun sharing stories, and we always feel like we could talk for days about our time overseas, we have so many pictures and memories that our hour-long sessions are never enough.  It is fun to look at the pictures again and again, knowing that almost every one of them has a story we could tell.  With literally thousands of pictures, we have enough material to blab for years, so we try to cut it down a little.  We are excited for the next two months of VBS and thousands of kids and pizza and pool parties and BBQ’s and everything else that summer brings.  Hopefully I will find time to continue updating my website with stories and pictures.  It’s hard to be as ambitious about it now, because nothing can compare to the amazing time overseas, which was really fun to write about.  So bear with us, and pray for us, and enjoy the more relatable stories you’ll read from now on.

Life is good, God is great!

-Kyle