Into the Bush

For the 8th time in 9 summers, I'm spending a week in Brevig Mission, a small Inupiat Eskimo village about 70 miles outside of Nome, Alaska. I'm here with a bunch of Lutherans and friends to lead Vacation Bible School in this village of about 350 people. It's one of my favorite weeks of the year.

I've blogged about this week before, but every year is different. The team is comprised of different people every year. Different kids come to Bible school. In fact, some of the kids who attended as middle school kids the first year are bringing their own kids now.  The weather is different every year. I'm different every year, too. I came first as an intern, now I come as a pastor almost seven years into my call....and also a wife.

As I write this from Pastor Brian's mac computer, I'm looking out at the impossibly blue waters of Port Clarence of the Bering Sea. The weather has been incredible since we arrived yesterday. The highs must be in the 60s and though it's almost midnight, the sky is brilliant blue and the sun is still shining. The fish are really running and the wooden racks up and down the beach are full of salmon, cut with horizontal marks and hung for weeks to dry. As we wandered about town today, inviting people to Bible school tomorrow, we heard that many people are at their fish camps away from the village, processing fish for colder times to come.

There is such incredible beauty here in the green, brown, red and gray hills and the sapphire sea that keeps changing shades. The people here are beautiful, too, welcoming us, visiting and church and offering us coffee when we visit in homes. There's plenty of pain, too. A young man took his life in November. A beloved elder died in June. Just today, we heard that a fisherman discovered a body washed up far down the beach. It belonged to a young man in Teller who died this winter. The body was decomposed. The hardest part: there were two young men who were lost from Teller in the icy sea this winter and the families wait to find out which body was just found.

We start Bible school tomorrow, at 2 pm, because folks who are up late in the sun tend to sleep in. We've asked some folks we know in Brevig if they'd help us lead Bible school. We wonder how many kids won't be able to come because they're putting up fish. We'll miss them, but we understand.

Bible school lasts for four days. We pick four Bible stories and lead crafts, story time, snacks and games. I always hope they hear something about a God that loves them no matter what. We're always talking cross-culturally, of course. Our theme this year is about God loving all people. For the first day, we're doing the Zacchaeus story. It's a great story about Jesus reaching out to someone that nobody liked. There is the slight problem that Zacchaeus climbed a tree to see Jesus and there's no trees for miles around here, but I guess we'll make do.

More tomorrow....