Out of the Mouths of Babes: She’s a Campenbell!

Tonight was Store Night at AWANA.  This quarterly event is set up to enable the children to spend their hard earned “AWANA Shares” or “AWANA Bucks” on a variety of fun prizes, such as stuffed animals, footballs, games, and craft kits.  Store Night is always a bit hectic, but the truly dedicated children still manage to say their memory verses at some point during the evening.

Patrick worked diligently with Connor this afternoon, helping him with memorizing the first six verses of Luke 2, the story of Jesus’ birth.  Connor has been stuck on this section of his memory work for a few weeks now.  It’s not that the verses are extremely hard, they aren’t, but they are longer than many of the verses he has memorized to date, and they do contain names of  several  people and places that Connor finds difficult to pronounce, and so he has been somewhat intimidated with the memorization.  After Patrick and Connor worked this afternoon, however, he had them down.

But Connor didn’t say his memory verses for his leader at AWANA tonight.  Instead, he shopped and he played until it was time to head home.  He walked to the car explaining how there just hadn’t been enough time for his verses because of Store Night.  When I pointed out that I had seen another little girl saying her verses to one of his leaders that evening, Connor responded.  “Mo-om, she’s a Campenbell,”* as if that explained it all.  But just in case I didn’t catch his full meaning, he added, “They study all day and they even read the Bible.”

“I see,” I said, suppressing a smile and wondering to myself what the time his father had spent with him that very afternoon was if it wasn’t studying, and filing away the fact that the Children’s Bible we read at bedtime  more nights than not is apparently not considered “reading the Bible,” at least not by my seven-year-old son who is clearly in awe of his good friends the Campenbells.*