This week my role at the Treasure Island VBS is as the old salty sea-dog storyteller. Each night I get to share stories from the Bible and elsewhere in my best pirate accent. I also get to help them learn a bible verse that relates to the story. Last night the story was Jonah. We talked about how sometimes God wants us to help others even when it’s hard or we don’t want to, and that whatever we do to the least of these we do for God (which was also our Bible memory verse). For me, however, the highlight was the game we played to learn the verse. As the kids said each word we had them toss a ball of yarn around the circle while still holding onto a part of it. By the end of it we had created a really cool spider’s web of connection between all of the kids. Then, one at a time I asked a few of them to drop their ends so that part of the web became slack, thus marring the whole pattern. The point was that we all need one another, and we all need to help one another. If we fail to help the least of these, even one person, the whole beautiful pattern is marred. Everyone is diminished.