Music Camp

Our kids are attending another church's VBS this week. We've all been doing it for years. Every year Covenant Pres puts on a bible musical and the McPhersons join for the ride (despite obvious lack of musical abilities.) I think this year is the story of Gideon, but don't quote me on that. I'm going to find out at the end of the week when I go cheer them on in their little performance. You see? Shakespeare camp isn't the only camp insane enough to put on a play with only one week of practice!

Coincidence: Music Camp was where I first met Josh Grace, when he played Shadrach and I played Abednego. I saw him just last night at fencing. I was going to ask whether his sisters were going to be in it, but didn't find a chance.

Curve Ball

On Friday we had our first restaurant outing for memorizing Scripture. I noticed however that there was one Bible verse that all the kids chose to memorize that messed them all up. Since they were allowed to pick which verses to memorize out of a given set of 18 (I had to memorize all of them, so I didn't care) I wondered why they didn't select one that was a bit easier.

The verse in question was Romans 11:3. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that was is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (ESV) I bolded the part that all the kids messed up. It doesn't look too hard at first glance, which is probably why the kids picked it. However, the stacking of passive construction, participle phrases, and relative clauses really throws the kids for a loop. For example, Luke simplified it to "what we see is made out of invisible things." True, I say, but that's not exactly what the verse says. Try again, Luke.

Pharisee

Today during devotions I revealed that I had memorized one of the verses in the passage. Dad had me recite it to prove it. Then after that every time he found a notable verse he would ask me if I had memorized it. There were two more that I had done, but one of them I recited incorrectly: God works all thing together for good for those who love him ~and keep his commandments~. That last part is actually supposed to say ~who are called according to his purpose~. I have absolutely no idea how that little legalist phrase snuck in to this otherwise uplifting piece of scripture. I suspect that I mushed it in from another verse that I had memorized somewhere, though I have no idea where. I'm such a Pharisee :(

Aha! I just googled it and it was another one of my verses: Deuteronomy 7:9! The lord keeps steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. Thanks, Google.

Bribery

This summer my siblings have all been drafted by Mom into the "Resteraunt Club." This means that they have to memorize a certain number of Bible verses and then I will drive them someplace nice to eat. Implied is the fact that I also have to memorize the verses or else I'm just going to have to sit there watching my siblings eat. Oh well, a little Bible memory never hurt anyone. Wish me luck.

Death by Steve Green

Have you all heard of the artist Steve Green? He puts Bible verses to song and then makes choruses of children sing them, probably on pain of death. Some of them are pretty catchy, but a bunch of them are really dull. Anyway Mom picked the most boring one on the CD that goes something like "Store up for yourseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelves, treeeeeeeasure in heeeaven!" and is now playing it over and over on the computer next to me. Every time it ends, she opens Windows Media Player and plays it again. I'm not going to tell her how the loop button works, or else I might not get these precious short intervals of silence. Anyway, she's either planning her next Sunday School lesson and is planning to include this song, or her next torture session with Osama Bin Laden and she's already given up on trying to get useful information out of him.

Conflicting messages

Yesterday we had a really good sermon at our church on 1 Samuel 16. I think it was 16, anyway. It was the chapter where David is anointed. Anyways, the main idea of the sermon was that 1 Samuel was not a self-help manual. If you are asking the question "Am I a David person or a Saul person?" you are asking the wrong question. God's plan is bigger than you. It's for you, but it's not about you and it fortunately does not depend on you. 1 Samuel points more to the king we need rather than the people we should be. Really good sermon. Agreed completely. Anyways, my kid brother got back from Sunday School and naturally our parents asked him what he learned in Sunday School. Andrew said that his teacher wanted the class to find something in David to emulate every week. (Although in 1 Samuel 16 the only traits of David that are shown were that he was ruddy and handsome.) Wait a minute! Wasn't that the question our pastor told us not to ask? And this was Senior High Sunday School! I think this was probably due to a communication failure between the pastor and the youth pastor. It'll probably be cleared up by next week. Hopefully.

Bible Bee is DONE~!

Ta-da! Bible bee is finally finished. I jammed through the written test and pretty much skipped the oral segment. I had to pass on every single verse because I hadn't studied them. Anyway this is neat: If you count up the number of verses I had memorized and the number of verses there were and then factor in the number of verses on the test, there was only a 47.2% chance that I would know at least one of the verses on the test. Pretty low odds. Anyways, it means I'm probably not going to nationals but WHATEVER!! At least I don't have to study any more. Phew. Although studying bible verses has been so much fun that I've been thinking of learning bible verses in a freelance manner now. Of course, with my motivational drive powers, I doubt it will ever amount to anything.

Bible Bee

Ah man, I still have made almost no progress on memorizing the verses for Bible Bee. The difficult thing about the Bible Bee vs the Spelling Bee is that if there is a word you haven't studied that shows up in the Spelling Bee, you can still get it by sounding it out and guessing. With the Bible Bee, that is impossible, unless you happen to be a pastor who knows "Hmmm. Romans 1-3 is about condemnation so Romans 3:23 should be something like 'For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.' hmmmm." Unfortunately, I'm not that good at guessing so I have to learn the verses the hard way.

Bible Bee

Well, now that's Shakespeare is over I can devote my entire time to memorizing scripture for the Bible bee. Of course, I calculated that to finish memorizing all the predetermined Bible verses in time for the Bee, I would have to memorize eight pages a day. Each page is roughly equivalent to 50 lines of Shakespeare. I thought memorizing Shakespeare was hard but it turns out my part only adds up to about three pages of Bible Bee, and I'm expected to memorize 85 pages. The Bible Bee is sponsored by some Institute which Mom has said is well-known for expecting too much from home-schoolers. I can't remember its name, but I'll get back to you on that. We'll be competing against the Broadwells and a bunch of as of yet unknown homeschoolers from this area. If I win, I could go straight to national where the winner gets an enormous pile of cash.

Unfortunately, I've been on the eight page a day diet for three days now and I've only memorized six pages total. Uh... My math sensors detect a discrepancy...

Misreads

My younger brother Luke is still in the area of life when he can't read every word in a sentence. Some of these mess-ups are entertaining like when he misread a verse in 1 Peter as "Cast your anxieties on him before he casts his anxieties on you." Or when he misread a sentence in his picture bible from "Jacob feared that Esau would attack his women and children" to "Jacob feared that Esau's women and children would attack him." Or when he misread "Jesse" as "Jesus." And I've come to find that "not" is the most underappreciated word in the English language. Only three letters long yet it is the most important word in every sentence. Leave it out and the sentence takes on a whole new meaning.

Deep theological questions.

Recently I was studying the story of Jacob and Esau and realized that although God loved Jacob and hated Esau, Esau was really the more righteous of the two.

First, Jacob takes advantage of his brother Esau, who is admittedly really stupid to trade his birthright for a bowl of soup. Then he goes ahead and lies to his father to steal his brother's inheritance. He then fears for his life and runs off. He marries two people and their maids. He goes home and is prepared to give Esau large amounts of cattle and land in exchange for not killing him and Esau forgives him. (It might have just been for the cattle. Who knows.)

What's really annoying is that if I were Esau and Andrew were Jacob, I would probably kill him promptly, but Esau forgave him. This is really bad because although Esau did something extremely admirable right there, the only other thing we knew about him was that God hated his guts.

The only consolation I have is that it doesn't matter how righteous you are because of Christ's death and resurrection. Without that, I would be beyond saving, worse even then a man God openly despised. Praise God.