25-year-old Dedication

I hope you all can read this (maybe click on the image and see if it'll magnify).  It's the dedication in a book my brother Bob gave me over 25 years ago for being in his wedding.  The book is "Come to Me" by Janie Lancaster McMinn, and it's published by Western Baptist Press right here in the good ol' Northwest. 

I'd forgotten I had this book until just today, when Katrina and I started Vacation Bible School at church.  She is leading a group, and I was enlisted as Bible story teller.  Now, the way the VBS curriculum has it set up is pretty elaborate - lots of costumes and characters, and rather lengthy scripts.  The VBS director (Cindy, our pastor's wife) told me to scrap that, and just tell the Bible stories we're doing for the week.  Today's was the birth of Christ.  Now, for this one, I didn't even need to brush up on the scriptures, because, thanks to the miracle of television and the watching of annual repeats on CBS since I was 2, I have the entire annunciation story memorized as told by Linus Van Pelt on the Charlie Brown Christmas special.  So, that's what I did with the kids today.  (And, yes, it was SOOOO hard not to end the telling with "And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown").

Things went very well.  I had a cool shepherd's costume from the church to wear (although Katrina said I looked somewhat like a pirate in a a surgical smock), and the awesome VBS leaders had the kids worked up into a frenzy by the time I took the stage as "Sam the Shepherd" to tell them the Christmas story.  And tell it I did, from beginning to end, only changing it enough to make the King James English of Linus' monologue more understandable to 21st-century kids.

Anyone remember how long it took Linus to give his speech explaining the true meaning of Christmas?  I'll tell you - it clocks in somewhere around a minute and a half.

I was alotted twenty-five.

Um...yeah.

Which brings us to the book I was speaking of earlier.  Bob gave me that book as a present for being a groomsman in his wedding - brown tuxedo with ruffles and too-small Buster Brown shoes and all.  The book made it through all my moves and various purges (one of which resulted in my donating to Goodwill a vintage 1960s juvenile fiction Bronc Burnett baseball novel that belonged to my brother Pat that's currently fetching somewhere around $600 on eBay).  I had read most of the stories in "Come to Me" as a kid, sometimes looking up the ones I'd read at Sunday School at Good Shepherd Presbyterian in Los Alamitos. 

Ms. McMinn has (had?  I don't know if she's even still alive - the book was published in 1971) a very gentle way of expressing Biblical truths to children.  When I was reviewing my performance today,  I realized I needed something to bulk things up - I can't spend a week making "Lava" Lori, the VBS worship director, have to come up with twenty extra minutes of songs every single day.

This book, given in love by my big brother so long ago, is being called into service again, in a way I'm sure neither Bob nor I could have ever imagined 25 years ago. I'll be using it the rest of the week to convey stories about Christ to over 160 little children, most of whose parents didn't even know each other when I received this book February 1, 1979.  God's word never returns void, indeed.