Live it Out: A Reflection on VBS

Written by J Punt

Parenting is a pretty daunting task. You have your little human beings in your household for 18 years—roughly 20% of their life and yours. You desperately want to use that window to build a virtuous and resilient character that can successfully navigate a complex world. Above all, you want to use this precious window to set your son or daughter on a trajectory that is moving toward ever closer intimacy with his or her creator and savior. 

Perhaps the weight of parenting is especially obvious to me now that I’ve just had my first daughter. Equally apparent to me at this moment is the immense blessing I consider the Waypoint village to be as Amelia and I begin the parenting journey. I think the week-long experience of VBS highlights how the Waypoint community blesses families who are pursuing Christ-like formation of their children. 

At VBS, our goals are quite ambitious. Think about those few vivid memories from your childhood that emanate with warmth and nostalgia and capture a defining aspect of who you are. It could be anything from the first time you rode on a rollercoaster and you laughed like you never have before to the first time you strongly succeeded at something you really wanted to be good at to a Christmas morning where your parents got you the gift of your dreams. We’re trying to generate those bright and lasting memories for kids in real time as they experience Live It Out VBS each day. It’s not just because we want them to be able to look back on a happy childhood. It's because we want a high percentage of their identity-forming memories to be laced with feelings of connection to loving Christian mentors and peers and above all we want their identity-forming memories to be laced with feelings of close connection to God.

To make this possible, it takes a multitude of mundane threads which we humbly ask God to weave together into a tapestry of mini miracles in the lives of the VBS participants. It takes a games captain who’s willing to raid her husband’s dress sock drawer so that she can stick them on pool noodles for the most popular VBS game of the week: “steal the sock.” It takes a small group leader who will carefully go through her curriculum and alert Toni and I that we need to print another sheet of Bible story stickers in order to really bring the passage to life for the 3 year olds in her group. It takes a childcare volunteer who’s willing to hold babies for four evenings out of the week so that the baby’s parents can serve the Waypoint kids. It takes a pre-VBS angel taking home a giant roll of forest green butcher paper to cut out 18 ft evergreen trees to turn our church into a mountainside escape. It takes a decorating volunteer willing to ascend our 15 ft ladder to hang these trees at the towering height they deserve. It takes our Bible story thespians pain-stakingly memorizing their lines at home just because it may help the message land a little more cleanly and directly with the campers once it's performed. 

Being a VBS director, it is truly a privilege to be able to witness a team of about 50 committed volunteers attack all these random tasks and many more with a level of dedication that is born at the intersection of their love for Christ and their love for kids. 

Ultimately, we can’t control the fate of our beloved children once they leave the nest. We’re not God. We can, however, take action in big and small, silly and serious ways to create the kind of childhood that prepares our kids for a life with Christ, a life that will feel like home to them as adults. I feel so blessed to be a part of a church that, for my money, has as willing a body of members to work toward this goal as any other church out there. 

To those of you who participated in VBS this year, I hope you feel as though your time was worth it. To those of you who weren’t involved with VBS, I hope you consider giving it a shot next year. Mark your calendars for June 15th-18th 2026 during which we’ll go on an epic KINGDOM QUEST! I am a bit biased, but I strongly feel it’s worth it.