Like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego

  We are switching campgrounds tonight, although that was not my plan until after lunch today. We're going to Bible Club Camp today. See link below for more of that story if you want.

As you may have figured out, some of the sorting we are doing wasn't high on our priority lists, but the the flood in the basement changed all that. Every single thing had to be moved, and now it has to be put back somewhere or disposed of.

Now I need to back up a lot of years and tell you another story. This was somewhere around 1972 or 1973. One of the teenage boys who lived with us off and on was helping me do some things. I had sorted some stuff (does the sorting ever end?) and had made two piles, one to keep and one to burn. I told Dan to take the discard pile out and burn it. He asked me which pile (they were in another room- the basement, actually), and I said, "You'll be able to tell." Well, that was my mistake, and I've had to blame myself ever since.

To his credit, at one point Dan realized he had the wrong pile and he brought the rest of the items back in the house. But a number of letters and some other things were gone forever. One of the things that was gone was the workbooks from all my years at Bible Club Camp.

These had no intrinsic value except perhaps as curiousities of the era. But they had a lot of sentimental value to me. And they had gone into the burn barrel.

Of course, you've now figured out what happened today. I found the whole set of workbooks. They must have been tucked into these shelves for decades. They were even moved from our old house to this one without being noticed. My innards surely did a leap when I saw what these were.

The books always had the theme song for the year, with the music, in the center. I've looked through the books, and I can still sing several of the songs.

Each book also had pages for the daily Bible lessons, words to other songs we sang, an autograph page, and other things to memorize. The center spread was a sticker page. Each year, you got a sticker each day for completing the Bible lesson and one for learning the daily verse. Then there was a sticker for "things you should know" (like the Apostles Creed or the pledge to the Christian flag), one for completing a camp craft during the week, and one for participating in recreation. That was required, so I suppose everyone got that. If you got all the others, you got the Honor sticker. You know me, I got all the stickers every year. I still like stickers and patches.

I'm sure the actual situation is that these books didn't get burned all those years ago, and somehow I wasn't aware of that. But it sure feels as if they had walked through the fire with those men of faith and Biblical fame.

In other news: I suddenly got the itch to start getting serious about the plot for Vacation from Dead Mule Swamp. This one will take more research than the others if I can pull off the idea I have in mind. At any rate, I wrote a tentative opening and started rereading the book that gave me the general idea. I also did laundry and puttered a little bit.

See Memories from Bible Club Camp