life-line

You may well wonder what on earth I'm doing still at it when the time is just after 1 o'clock in the morning!

The answer is simple. Holiday Club.

We run an Easter Holiday Club every year and on the Thursday evening we hold a 'DVD night'.

A DVD of the Holiday Club. Not last year's. But this year's. An as-it-happens sort of thing.

Which works a treat. It's great to be able to give a DVD to every child as a lasting memory of the fun that they've had and the things that they've learned through the week.

And so they always come out on the Thursday night for the 'world premiere' of the DVD. And it gets played thereafter through the course of the following year who knows how many times!

It's a terrific way of getting the message across. Even the songs which for the constant backdrop to the DVD kind of soak right into the consciousness and leave their mark.

But it does involve the small little business of actually making the DVD!

My job. Which I love, I'm bound to say.

It just means a good few nights when there's barely any sleep as the huge amount of footage gets edited out and made into something that'll be a lasting and wonderful reminder to all of the children - and all of their parents too - of the week they've had.

So just at the moment I've got 'time to kill' as the final, edited version now gets 'exported' into an appropriate format, ready to be made into a DVD.

The computer just works away on its own for maybe half an hour and does this next little bit itself.

I get to hang around. Waiting patiently. And I have to say rather prayerfully too, since these next two parts of the process are always the ones which take up loads of time, and where loads of things can go wrong.

The week has been full with the Holiday Club. It's been wonderful.

Over 140 children. Who absolutely revel in the whole thing.

And a brilliant team of people. Old and young alike. And everything in between.

Who all get on like a house on fire.

It's great to see the young folk grow in their faith by their being involved in a thing like this and seeing the Lord at work in the lives of so many people.

That's why we always invest the time and energy in running the Club. And why we produce the DVD as well.

God underlines that nothing we do is ever in vain. Which means that somewhere down the line there's a kind of 'pay-off'. What we give and do bears its fruit.

That's our prayer for a week like this.

And that's why I've got what some would call a 'deadline' for first thing in the morning (I'm watching the clock even now!).

I prefer to call it a 'life-line', though.

Since that's what we trust that everything we do will prove to be for folk.