A Poignant Story

July 2007

Dear Friends,

July has many distinctives: vacations, kids at play, picnics, barbequed hamburgers and hot dogs with mustard and chili, baseball in the park, hot weather, humidity, bike rides, flags, parades, fireworks, visits with relatives, gorgeous flowers, green grass and trees. I love them all (except humidity). I especially love the kids. I know it’s sometimes tough to keep your youngsters from getting bored and clobbering each other, but July wouldn’t be July without them. It is also a month for memories, and I hope you are making and storing lots of them during this mid-summer interlude. It will be gone very quickly. Make the most of it. And pay attention. Take my word for it, parents: You will want to revisit many of these halcyon days in years to come.

This month of July has another distinctive for those of us who are involved in our local churches. It is known as VBS, or Vacation Bible School. These programs are usually led by volunteers and a few weary pastors and staff members. They offer wonderful opportunities for Christians to introduce neighborhood children to Jesus, and to reinforce biblical concepts for regular church attendees. I remember with warmth those mid-summer events and the youth camps that came along with them. I will never forget the camp experience. I fell madly in love every year with girls I would never see again. I also learned to trust and obey God in a way that would influence the rest of my life. I never thought to thank the adults who labored to make these programs possible, but I guess it isn’t too late to do so. Or maybe it is. Most of those saints are in heaven now, enjoying the place they described for me as a child.

These memories have been resurrected recently by reading a column by one of my favorite writers. His name is Edwin Leap, and he is a physician whose writings I have shared with you before. Dr. Leap is the kind of doctor we would all love to have. He is a staff physician in the emergency room at Oconee Memorial Hospital in Seneca, South Carolina, and the reader can tell from his writings that he is deeply committed to his patients. He is also a keen observer of human behavior. For those who enjoy the column I am about to share, you can get a copy of Dr. Leap’s books from Focus on the Family. His first was entitled, Working Knights: A Collection of Observations and Insights about Doctors, Patients, and the Practice of Medicine; and the second is simply, Cats Don’t Hike.

Well, let me get to Dr. Leap’s comments about VBS, which were published in a magazine for physicians entitled Emergency Medicine News.

Finding Wisdom Behind the Wheel of the Vacation Bible School Bus

by Edwin Leap, M.D.

Vacation Bible School is ingrained into the culture of the South. It is present in many places around the country, but here in the buckle of the Bible Belt, it’s as Southern as pork rinds, boiled peanuts and pretty girls in pickup trucks. Vacation Bible School, hereafter referred to as VBS, is a week each church takes during the summer to provide a glorious mixture of sugary snacks, Kool-Aid, games and God.

During VBS, otherwise normal adults dress in costume and dance in front of hundreds of children in a church to make them laugh and teach them lessons from the Bible. Mothers, young and old, congregate in hot kitchens to dispense snacks to frenzied children. Fathers organize three-legged races and dodgeball in steamy meeting halls and gyms without air conditioning. And the brave lead Bible classes for the energized, sugar-driven mass of budding evangelicals.

My wife volunteered us for this year’s festivities. Somehow, she managed to be put in charge not only of a kindergarten class but also the bus ministry, which meant driving to local neighborhoods with low-income housing so that the children there could come to VBS. Because we are married and the Bible says that makes us one person, I was also pressed into the bus ministry. She arranged the wristbands to identify the children, but I got to drive one of the buses.

After a short, and I mean really short, introductory course in the operation of the bus/large van, I was blessed, and sent on my way with a helper. After many years of being a physician, of making snap decisions in the wee hours, of watching life and death, calculating doses, weighing risk and throwing caution to the four winds, driving a bus was fantastic.

There were only a few rules. Drive slowly because the bus sure isn’t a sports car. Unlock the back door before starting, or the engine won’t turn on. Look both ways several times to avoid logging trucks. Turn on the stop sign that comes out from the side of the bus whenever you stop. (This is an exciting, magical thing to a childish mind like mine.) Take speed bumps verrryyy slooowwwly. Pick up the children on time. Take them home on time. Don’t let them dismantle the bus or murder one another. And finally, don’t drive under things with lower clearance than the bus. (I added that rule after driving under a rain shelter.)

They weren’t hard rules. The bus was a simple joy, as were the children. They lined up every day on the side streets of Walhalla, South Carolina. There were excited and nervous, scared and tentative. And they needed some VBS.

What I saw from behind the wheel of the bus were the places my patients live. Not all of them, but a few. I saw their government-subsidized homes, their neighborhoods where shady young men in shady cars drove around looking menacing. I saw the homes and trailers where families come and go so quickly, where there is little certainly, little money, probably not a little anxiety. I saw the children walk alone to board the bus to ride to a church they didn’t attend, then go home, again alone, with no one nearby, only a parent in a trailer hopefully watching.

On the bus, I heard children say things that were inappropriate for children but obviously were learned from the wrong music and unconcerned adults. I heard nervous children and predatory children. A mother asked me to watch out for her son because two other kids liked to beat him up. I watched a little girl with cerebral palsy get on the bus with her obviously low functioning mother, and I wondered how they got by. And I felt my heart race as I watched a man in the side mirror sneak along the side of the bus, stalking it like a carjacker, but who fortunately turned out to be the same mother’s husband or boyfriend or something.

Driving the bus took me to my patients’ worlds. It introduced me to children I had seen or surely would in the near future as they became sick or injured, pregnant or violent. It reminded me of the inestimable blessings my own children have, how they live in the same secure home, who have loving and involved parents, and who do not wonder each day if someone will attack them with words or fists.

VBS and the bus made me a simple observer again, a man driving the bus to take them someplace nice, to a brick church building with smiling faces, where they would get messages of welcome and happiness, where they would be invited to join a kind of family if they wished. It was good not to be a doctor, not to think about diagnoses and charting and all the other clutter. It was good to see the people I see, in a different place, in a different way.

I saw them and understood why they don’t pay bills. I understood how they develop anxiety at a young age, how they get injured, how they get abused and lost. I understood why they sleep together too young and make babies they aren’t ready for, because it’s all a search for love and constancy. I saw so much. When I wasn’t driving the bus, I was security, which meant walking around running errands, eating too many cookies, keeping wild boys in line, and stopping nosebleeds. There too, I saw the children, saw the ones with nice lives and the ones without. And I understood a little more about the people I care for in the white cubicles of the emergency department, and maybe about why they seem to like the hospital so very much. It’s one of the only safe comfortable places they ever go.

All in all, I can’t complain about anything. Insurance battles and malpractice woes and medical politics and money and all the rest seemed so petty, so pointless, in the face of the children whose lives are lived out in tiny, standardized brick buildings where drugs are so constant as the lizards that run around my house.

If, as I recently decided, compassion is the only real key to competence, then I may be a better doctor because I spent a few evenings driving the bus to VBS.

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Did this wonderful article bring back any long-buried memories for you? It certainly did for me. I also appreciated the compassion expressed by Dr. Leap toward inner-city children who often lack the stability of intact families. Thank God for churches that send their members and their buses into those sometimes troubled neighborhoods, to minister and to show the love of the Lord. Children, especially the young, can be impacted for a lifetime by the kindness and attention paid by those who tell them about Jesus. If you are working as a volunteer in your church this summer, thank you! I’m sure you are busy with the cares of living, but the time you are giving to children will last forever. As the Savior said, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14, KJV).

In closing, please consider helping Focus on the Family survive the lean months of summer. It has already been a pretty difficult year for us financially, and the expenses never take a “vacation.” We appreciate your partnership so much, and hope to meet you personally when the opportunity affords. We’d love to have you on campus while the kids are out of school. I know they would enjoy spending a day in the Adventures in Odyssey® area in our Welcome Center, and you parents will be well taken care of, too. And please pray for us when our names come to mind. We are one in the bonds of love.

Sincerely,

James C. Dobson, Ph.D.
Founder and Chairman

P.S. Thanks to the continued generosity of friends of this ministry, Focus on the Family has been providing biblically based family advice on radio stations around the world for more than 30 years. Technological advances have allowed us to broaden our broadcasting opportunities at a rapid rate. Of course, our daily program is already available on our Web site, but now we have something new to add to our audio menu. I’m pleased to announce the recent launch of two podcasts featuring my perspectives on marriage and parenting. With multiple releases each week, these short features are perfect for busy couples and parents who are looking to strengthen their family relationships. Won’t you please give them a try and tell a few friends about them, too? Thank you! To listen and subscribe to these dynamic new features, please visit listen.family.org