As I've posted on Facebook recently, we went to Pittsburgh this past weekend for a Bible quizzing tournament. As we unloaded, we discovered that one of the Kindles, my old one, had been damaged beyond repair when the driver's seat had been moved back on it. I reflected with grim amusement that it was a rather costly addition to the total cost of our trip, which, while not outrageous, was nothing to sneeze at. And then - because I do this when it comes to money - I started to ponder the total cost for our whole team.
Four cars made the four hour trip from the Dayton area to Pittsburgh.
One car made an eight hour trip from South Carolina!
Nine or ten hotel rooms were secured.
Our church paid the cost of registration for three teams.
23 Chick-fil-A catered lunches were purchased, plus numerous snacks and drinks for quizzers throughout the weekend.
Twenty-two of us splurged on dinner at Buca di Beppo following the tournament.
And, of course, the smashed up Kindle.
Adding up the actual dollars would make me anxious, so I'm not going to do that. And I haven't even begun to talk about the hours that went into planning, preparing, driving, herding kids, encouraging and exhorting kids, comforting kids, celebrating with kids, going back and forth between buildings - and up and down three flights of stairs - where quizzes were held. so we could check in on all three teams...
Was it worth it?
I mean, really, it's not like there are career opportunities in quizzing (if there were, I know I'm not the only former quizzer who would have been ALL over that!). There aren't even big scholarships to be had for these kids. Even in the most immediate sense of reward, everyone has a good time, but, truthfully, it's not a high-energy funfest. It involves mostly work - studying in the weeks and months beforehand, and participating in quiz after quiz after quiz during the tournament. A few of them get ribbons or trophies in the end - most go home just with memories. Almost all of them want to go back, and almost all the parents and grandparents are willing to pour all that money and all those man-hours in again the next year.
Why?
Because, as I've said before and will say again and again, there's nothing like quizzing for filling kids with pure, unfiltered, and uncensored Scripture. Nothing. I repeat - nothing. That's not to say all this expense is necessary for getting kids to memorize large portions of Scripture. But...are they actually doing it it elsewhere? And I'm not being insulting, I promise. I put a high value on memorization, but it's hard to do and to get kids to do, I know. But quizzing provides a means to that end, and in no other program that I know of do kids get the amount of Scripture that they do in quizzing - and in a form that gives them the whole picture. I think that is vital, by the way. The danger in memory verses, in my humble opinion, is that they can give people incomplete and ineffective information. How many people have heard, "All things work together for good?" And how many of those people are bewildered and assailed with doubt when circumstances don't really come together for any kind of good whatsoever? It's not the whole picture, people - read the the whole book. And here, this very year, we have 3rd through 12th graders doing just that, reading, listening to, and memorizing the entire book of Romans -and not just once, but over and over. Then they come together with kids from other towns and other churches, and they share that knowledge.
In one of the quizzes, our team of 3rd grade boys was competing, and they were having some trouble keeping still enough to keep their lights off. (Junior quizzers are generally smaller than who the lights and benches were designed for). So on one question, the quizmaster began, "Put..." and Ryan's light went off by mistake. But at that point, mistake or no, quizzers have to try to answer. So he got up, thought about it for a few seconds, then shrugged and guessed, "Put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness?" The quizmaster said, "Correct," and the room erupted in cheers. What a fun moment! And how wonderful. I rather doubt this would be passed out as a memory verse anywhere else - it's not very pretty. But the rest of it is "...and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls."
The Word is truly being planted in their hearts - and in a way that will empower them to choose, to defend, and to grow. It's the Word that is able to save their souls. So yes, that's worth it.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Friday, January 3, 2014
In Which I Dissect a Perfectly Good Children's Movie
We went down South this past weekend to visit my family. Dave couldn't come with us, so I took five kids and a dog on the longest trip I've ever attempted by myself, much less with all that crew. We had our difficult moments along the way, but I kept telling the kids (and myself), "I know it's hard, but just keep thinking about how it's going to be totally worth it!" And it was. Lots of family, lots of food, lots of noise, lots of fun... All my parents' grandchildren were there, and the ten of them had more fun together than sometimes the adults could stand - like when they made a fort out of the hall closet doors that had somehow detached, or when they tried to see how high they could stack bean bags against the pool table. There was also gleeful running, for no apparent reason, in circles, round and round and round and round and round my parents' house, accompanied by squeals of delight. But it was delight, so that made it just fine. We also saw my youngest sister and her very soon husband-to-be, and that was truly wonderful, as we hadn't seen them in two years.
So a good visit all the way around. One day we took all the kids to the theater to see Frozen, and that was fun, too. My three-year old niece's running commentary throughout the movie was truly the best thing ever, incidentally. It was even more enjoyable than the movie itself, which I did enjoy, but Aimee and I talked it over afterwards and worked out all the ways it could have been even better. Because of course it was very Disney - fairly predictable characters, slapstick comic relief, and a tidy, happy ending, which wasn't bad at all (the snowman really was quite funny), but as a supposed retelling of the Snow Queen, it could have been so much better.
I don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I won't rehash the whole movie. But I think Aimee and I agreed that the divide between the characters should have been sharper, and Elsa, the older sister, should have been made to descend even deeper into the dark side (or the cold side, if you rather). Instead, one thing I saw in the story - in the characters and even in the visuals - was that warm, sunny and extroverted equals good; while cold, reserved, and introverted equals, while not "bad" exactly, certainly not-as-good. Granted, Elsa had to be reserved and restrained, so perhaps hers was not a completely natural introversion, but even so, sometimes there are instances in which a person must stay reserved to stay on top of personal struggles.
So I rolled my eyes once or twice during the song in which the girls are both anticipating the same event, and yet Anna sings warmly and freely about opening doors, and Elsa anxiously sings about closing them. The idea of people and events swarming into an environment certainly does seem wonderful to some people, and it would be hard to be cut off from that. But that Elsa didn't want that, that she found it stressful and a strain on her careful protection of her unwanted ice skills, wasn't, to me, as sad as the movie wanted it to be. As an introvert, often that's precisely how I feel, so I certainly sympathized with her character. Now, some may point out that she didn't want to feel that way, because she was desperately trying to hide her skills/curse. As I said, though, sometimes it IS necessary to exercise restraint, and that means you can't just open up to everyone and be happy. I have OCD, and I think I have mentioned this before, but it is not at all what is commonly portrayed. It isn't simply the desire to have things in order, to be meticulous, or to have an aversion to germs. In fact, in more than half the cases of OCD, the compulsions aren't obvious to outsiders. Look up "Pure O," and you'll have a pretty good view of my struggle since childhood. It's one I've had a great deal of victory in, and I am not at all trying to get a pity party together for myself. But it takes work, it drains energy, and it is something that prevents me from being able to "just relax," or "just let things go." If I didn't direct effort toward staying on top of things, in fact, it would overwhelm me. Often, it hinders my ability to be spontaneous and to seem relaxed and free. So I could completely identify with Elsa in the scene in which her sister is trying to talk to her, to share with her, and Elsa is sitting on the other side of the wall, in her room, surrounded by the ice she was trying to desperately to control and hide - but which she couldn't.
Obviously, the fact that Elsa was unhappy and unable to interact with her sister at all wasn't a desirable state. But I thought the eventual treatment her character received robbed her of her essence. I would have preferred a true Snow Queen - whose colder, more reserved qualities were actually validated, even if it mean that it set her apart from others. I think she could have had a story in which she found a level of freedom, but that also acknowledged that she could never have been as carefree as her sister, just as many of us in the real world are never, for various reasons, going to be as warm, cheerful , and carefree as some others. And it's okay.
But it IS a children's movie, of course, and as such, it was cute.
So a good visit all the way around. One day we took all the kids to the theater to see Frozen, and that was fun, too. My three-year old niece's running commentary throughout the movie was truly the best thing ever, incidentally. It was even more enjoyable than the movie itself, which I did enjoy, but Aimee and I talked it over afterwards and worked out all the ways it could have been even better. Because of course it was very Disney - fairly predictable characters, slapstick comic relief, and a tidy, happy ending, which wasn't bad at all (the snowman really was quite funny), but as a supposed retelling of the Snow Queen, it could have been so much better.
I don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I won't rehash the whole movie. But I think Aimee and I agreed that the divide between the characters should have been sharper, and Elsa, the older sister, should have been made to descend even deeper into the dark side (or the cold side, if you rather). Instead, one thing I saw in the story - in the characters and even in the visuals - was that warm, sunny and extroverted equals good; while cold, reserved, and introverted equals, while not "bad" exactly, certainly not-as-good. Granted, Elsa had to be reserved and restrained, so perhaps hers was not a completely natural introversion, but even so, sometimes there are instances in which a person must stay reserved to stay on top of personal struggles.
So I rolled my eyes once or twice during the song in which the girls are both anticipating the same event, and yet Anna sings warmly and freely about opening doors, and Elsa anxiously sings about closing them. The idea of people and events swarming into an environment certainly does seem wonderful to some people, and it would be hard to be cut off from that. But that Elsa didn't want that, that she found it stressful and a strain on her careful protection of her unwanted ice skills, wasn't, to me, as sad as the movie wanted it to be. As an introvert, often that's precisely how I feel, so I certainly sympathized with her character. Now, some may point out that she didn't want to feel that way, because she was desperately trying to hide her skills/curse. As I said, though, sometimes it IS necessary to exercise restraint, and that means you can't just open up to everyone and be happy. I have OCD, and I think I have mentioned this before, but it is not at all what is commonly portrayed. It isn't simply the desire to have things in order, to be meticulous, or to have an aversion to germs. In fact, in more than half the cases of OCD, the compulsions aren't obvious to outsiders. Look up "Pure O," and you'll have a pretty good view of my struggle since childhood. It's one I've had a great deal of victory in, and I am not at all trying to get a pity party together for myself. But it takes work, it drains energy, and it is something that prevents me from being able to "just relax," or "just let things go." If I didn't direct effort toward staying on top of things, in fact, it would overwhelm me. Often, it hinders my ability to be spontaneous and to seem relaxed and free. So I could completely identify with Elsa in the scene in which her sister is trying to talk to her, to share with her, and Elsa is sitting on the other side of the wall, in her room, surrounded by the ice she was trying to desperately to control and hide - but which she couldn't.
Obviously, the fact that Elsa was unhappy and unable to interact with her sister at all wasn't a desirable state. But I thought the eventual treatment her character received robbed her of her essence. I would have preferred a true Snow Queen - whose colder, more reserved qualities were actually validated, even if it mean that it set her apart from others. I think she could have had a story in which she found a level of freedom, but that also acknowledged that she could never have been as carefree as her sister, just as many of us in the real world are never, for various reasons, going to be as warm, cheerful , and carefree as some others. And it's okay.
But it IS a children's movie, of course, and as such, it was cute.
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