Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Playing with Matches or The Week I was a Baptist...

When I was about ten years old I attended Vacation Bible School at a local Baptist church with my friend Heather. Vacation Bible School was nothing at all like Catholic school. For one thing, the Baptists seemed really happy. For another, they let us play with matches.

Yes, the Baptists gave us matches.

The year must have been around 1982, and perhaps the Baptist's belief that God would protect us from harm put their mind at ease as they explained the week's art project. They handed each of us a box of 500 matches, instructed us to light each one, blow it out, and then glue it to a cardboard cross.

No one had ever let me use matches before. They were strictly the purview of smokers, sinners, and psychopaths. I had no idea they were also the tools of Baptists!

I bet that right now you are thinking to yourself, "Hey! I would like to make a match cross for Jesus too!". All you need to do is get some instruments of Satan matches, some glue and follow the directions on this site.  You'll notice that the author emphasizes that this is not a craft for children. She is clearly not a Baptist.

http://www.junkdrawerblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/matchstick-cross.jpg

Anyway, all week I lit matches and blew them out, thrilled with the feeling of responsibility which was never bestowed upon me by the nuns, whose idea of fun learning was a film strip about lepers. I glued them into place and still found the time to memorize all of the books of the Bible so that I could win a Snickers Bar. The nuns never ever gave me a Snickers bar, just a boat load of guilt and self loathing.

Matches and candy. A lesson for us all.

4 comments:

Eryn said...

I've gotta find a way to work this into our homeschool day!

Our heathen, sin-filled secular homeschool day.

Whatever!

Mr. Bigtime Pimp said...

Is it me, or is there a certain irony in making a cross out of matches, when there are those out there who would burn a cross... ;-)

Mel said...

You made me laugh SO HARD! LOL

Unknown said...

I LOVE that step one states: "This is NO for children to do" under the burning matches...Only those crazy Baptists!
They are very beautiful and I remember making these at GilGal (crazy born again Christians)that tried to brain wash us on Friday Nights that their church was more fun then ours. They used to bribe us with cookies, projects and a trampoline...remember when childhood used to be easy!