Love is an action word 

My favorite T-shirt reads, “Love is an action word.” I connect to it because it reminds me that love is not just a feeling. Love is a call, a responsibility, to ensure that our words and our actions help everyone to be seen, loved, and valued as their true self. If I am honest, I am often drawn to things that strive to explain love. We have heard Bishop Curry preach that love is the way over and over and over again. But what does that mean, and how do we do it?  In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In just a few weeks, the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego will roll out our first Vacation Bible School curriculum, “Love is…”  This arts-based curriculum will open spaces for children to connect to God and each other as they create beautiful art pieces, write skits that reveal God’s work in themselves and the world and sing–sing songs that are filled with LOVE and JOY.

Rooted in scripture, you can look forward to games, yoga, and registration forms—everything you need to begin… or to begin again.

The best part is that you are invited. You are invited to utilize this curriculum to welcome children and their families to your campus. You are invited to hang banners on your buildings and fences to tell your community that they are invited too. Together we will explore scripture and build communities of connection and LOVE. 

One of my most joyful encounters with LOVE is in the laughter of children. Children can allow joy to fill up their entire being. It is the kind of joy that bubbles up and cascades from their mouths–the joy that rings out of buildings and across campuses. It is infectious. It is vulnerable. It is true. That joy, that laughter, is the sound of LOVE. Creating spaces where children can be children allows them to share their joy and LOVE with the world.

LOVE is an action word. And this Summer, that looks like Vacation Bible School!

LOVE is… an arts-based Vacation Bible School program for children entering grades 1-5 based on 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Resources will include:

• advertising materials
• online forms
• art projects
• music
• games
• schedules

Information sessions are scheduled for March 27, 28, and 30th. Follow this link to register for an information session.