So this past week at Journey’s Treasure Island VBS, the children discovered that God wants us to treasure things like loving our family, helping others, and caring for creation. They learned how to be reverse pirates – instead of greedily seeking treasure for themselves, they gave of their treasure to help kids in Haiti. But at the same time, everyone had fun learning how to talk like a pirate. We dressed up as pirates and peppered our language with silly pirate phrases all week. So that the rest of you can keep up with the Journey kids in conversation now, we thought we would provide you with a brief tutorial on “how to talk like a pirate.”

Ahoy, mateys – general greeting, “hi there”
Aye, Aye – yes
Arrgh – pirate exclamation for a wide variety of situations
Avast – pay attention
Shiver me timbers – expression of fear and surprise
Smartly there – hurry up
Me Hearties – my dear friends

So the next time you bump into one of the Journey kids as you are sailing the high seas, great them with an “Ahoy, matey” and take them back to their time on Treasure Island.

One of the joys of VBS is watching what the kids take away from the week. Having such an intense daily experience where the kids get to “do church” and learn about God outside of the ways they normally do truly does affect their lives. My kids, for instance, have been singing the songs from the week around the clock. I hear my daughter singing to herself as she lies in her bed at night, and even my barely verbal toddler has got the “na na na” chorus down. These songs, these ideas, these themes are part of their life now even if they don’t fully grasp their meaning.

As an adult who knows that she will never fully understand her own faith or the ways God works in the world, I get that the kids will only partially understand what they are singing or what they are learning. But they are internalizing these ideas in a loving and safe environment. That is how God is working in their lives in the moment.

Of course, that partial understanding can be amusing at times as well. As my daughter sang a VBS song about dancing and singing for her king, I asked her who her king was. She gave me a weird look and after thinking for a moment said her brother’s name. She explained that he was the person she liked to dance and sing with so he must be her King. We had a nice little chat about God being the king of kings, but I was moved that at the age of 5 she grasped the joy and exuberance of worship that song suggests far better than most of us. 

God is working in these kids’ lives – often in ways we don’t plan or expect. Creating the space for them to experience God is, for me, at the heart of what it means to serve children. And often in helping create that space, the children in turn teach me something and draw me closer to God.

At the Journey Warehouse we call our gathering space “the living room.” I love the image because the living room is where a family does life together. We make it cozy, we make it represent who we are, and we claim it as our own. Over this past year Journey’s living room has been transformed into a garden, a threshold archway, a waterfall, and even the wonderful world of Oz. These transformations represent where we as a community, a family, are going together.

This week the living room has become a bit of Treasure Island, complete with a Pirate’s Lair, Tiki Hut, and Jungle. The children have claimed the space for themselves as they sail across the seas as merchants and dance to rousing choruses of “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.” As they explore what things God wants them to treasure, they have grown comfortable in the space and it has become their own. While at times this familiarity might be chaotic, there is something special about knowing the kids feel safe and at home in the living room.

I’ve worked in churches before that made rules about where -- and more importantly where not -- children could be in the church. Church councils would pass rules barring children from the sanctuary or the fellowship time. The kids were kept hidden in the basement – far, far away from the adults. And the kids knew that they were not wanted, that the church was not a place where they were truly welcomed or safe.

So I am so grateful for the community at Journey embracing its members of all ages. For saying to children, teens, and adults alike that “this is your home, come on in and relax, let this place represent you.”

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.

Yesterday, a group of twenty children embarked on a journey in search of Treasure Island at Journey’s Vacation Bible School. Between creating their own treasure maps, playing dress like a pirate relays, and learning how to talk like a pirate, the kids were guided through an exploration of what it means to treasure something. They learned that treasure is a collection of precious things and were encouraged to reflect on what they consider precious in their own lives. 

The theme verse for the week is, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” The intent is to help the kids understand that treasuring the things God wants us to treasure – like our families, the needs of others, and God’s creation – is the best way for us to live. Through stories of Bible characters who struggled with the very question of what they should treasure (like Esther and Jonah) and songs about ways we can love and serve God, the kids will be exposed to ideas about what it really means to treasure the things God wants us to treasure.

As part of helping the kids learn to treasure the needs of others, we will be exploring each night a little bit about Haiti (a major pirate center back in the day). They will learn what life is like for children in Haiti and hear a story about a young Haitian boy who does his best to show love to his little sister. As part of this focus on Haiti, the kids were encouraged to be reverse pirates and share their treasure with children in Haiti. Each night of VBS a collection will be taken for the Journey Haiti Mission team to use to build a school in Haiti. 

As adults at Journey, we often share how hard it is to live a life that follows earnestly after God. Treasuring the needs of others or God’s beautiful creation can be difficult. Too often our selfish desires guide our hearts instead. This VBS wants to serve the kids of Journey by helping them start living at a young age a life that cares for others and that treasures what God wants them to treasure. At the same time, it will convey to them that even when we treasure the wrong things, God still completely loves us. 

So it is with this precious task of well serving Journey’s children that we’ve set sail this week on our quest for Treasure Island… 

Philippians 4:4-8 (Rick’s interpretation) 

Find your joy in God, always. Let me say this again: find your joy. Be gentle with every single person. Do not worry about any single thing. Instead, in every moment, give thanks to God and ask for what you need. And God’s peace -- the peace that God gives, that cannot be understood -- will guard the gates to your hearts and minds.

So, in closing, brothers and sisters, I encourage you to focus on these things:

the things that are the most steeped in truth;
the things that are the most noble in character and nature;
the things that are deeply right and true;
the things that are shining and pure;
the things that are beautiful;
the things that are worth admiring and following;
anything that is excellent and worth speaking well of. 

Those are the things I want you -- I urge you -- to think about and talk about and live toward.

This poem by Cheryl Lawrie was posted on her blog, hold this::space, in October 2009.

wash me with this water

wash me
with the water
that isn’t clean

the holy water
wash me with the water 
that holds the dirt
of all history
the sweat from hard work
the grime of play

the scrubbed sin
the diluted confession

wash me in this 
so i will know i am human

wash me with this water
that holds the tears 
of all history
cried by the broken and the fragile
the resilient and strong

bathe me with the water
that has showered with joy
and flooded with fear
that has rained on both the just and the unjust

wash me in this
so i will know i will survive

and wash me
with the water that has quenched the thirst
for drink
forever
but never the thirst
for longing

so i will know 
what it is
to live.

Earlier this year, amid the din of political bickering happening, in this case, on another friend’s Facebook page, fellow Journeyer Melinda Hasting Wheatley (writer, poet, parent, educator) shared this beautiful statement. I believe it with all my heart, and wish to live it every day: 

I have this sense that we are all the same, all one. Poor and rich, haves and have-nots, criminals and saints, wives and adulterers, ignorant and intelligent, god-fearing and lovers of darkness.

There is nothing that makes me superior to you in character or deed or status or behavior or genetics or culture or gender or race or belief system. Nor you to me.

If I behave toward you as my brothers and sisters, fathers, mothers, friends, self, then my judgments of you ring hollow– for where I see your weakness in one area, you inevitably transcend me in another.

To eliminate the idea that I somehow have the experience and wisdom to judge you is what I strive to do, and I hope for you to do the same of me.

A fair, impartial judge could take a look at my life in its entirety and FAIRLY condemn me to hell for my vast character defects (I have so many). Yet, that same judge could raise me up as an example of courage and fortitude and beauty (I have these, too). In the end, my wholeness is inherently “good” and “evil”, light and dark, blending me to an awareness of God through my mistakes, allowing me to minister to others in my good choices.

Love, love.

Marilynne Robinson is an award-winning American author and essayist. Here is an excerpt from “Psalm 8” in her 1998 collection The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.

“So, I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.

A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.” 

German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. On the original manuscript of this sermon, Tillich wrote in his own handwriting, “For Myself! 20 August 1946.” It was his sixtieth birthday.

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaninglessness and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we feel we have violated another life, a life which we have loved, or from which we were estranged...It strikes us when, year after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”