Bee-ing a hard worker paid off

This summer Strider, with some strong encouragement from his parents (alright, yes, Strider, we "made" you do it), signed up to be a Bible Bee contestant for the 2nd time. The National Bible Bee is an organization, founded in memory of a pretty amazing young woman, which encourages young people to study and memorize God's Word.

Last year was not a banner year for him as a contestant. He memorized a lot of verses throughout the summer.... and by the end had forgotten just about all of them. Needless to say, he was not a very high-scorer in the final competition.

But there must be something about turning 10 that changes a boy's work ethic into.... well, a work ethic. At least in Strider's case. We've seen him really work hard at a few things in his life -- and they've all been in the last couple of months. He tackled the Bible Bee challenges with some gusto, along with some complaining... and now at the end of the summer, his memory muscle has gotten quite strong.

This year's Bible Bee program consisted of a 10-week Bible study on the book of Colossians (including books for the parents to work through, as well as the student), and 250 Bible verses for the kids in Strider's age group to memorize. Strider was in the Primary age group; the older kids, called Juniors and Seniors, had hundreds more to learn!

Strider did not learn or memorize all the material, but we think he did great-- he learned about 75 verses perfectly, and did a lot of the Colossians study.

Yesterday the local competitions were held across the country. The contest first included an oral round, in which contestants were asked to quote (exactly, word-for-word) as many of 30 random passages as they could in 10 minutes in front of judges who determined their points based on how many words they missed. Then, the 2nd part of the contest was an hour-long written test of 200 questions. I made Strider mad by snapping this shot of him during his written portion:

After lunch, they announced the winners of this local contest -- and Strider won his age group! It was so exciting to see his hard work pay off! He got a gift card as a prize, so he was pretty thrilled with that. (The top 100 students in each age group across the country are invited to Chicago in November for the national Bee. If Strider's score was high enough, he could end up getting to go... we'll find out in a few days.)

Then, for fun, they staged a competition similar to how the national round goes. The top 5 kids from each group yesterday were given chances to quote verses in front of the whole audience. If they did not get the verse perfectly correct, they were out. Talk about nerve-racking!

Here's Strider quoting his first passage. I can't remember now which one they asked him to do, but he got it correct! I do remember that the passage, later, that he missed a letter in, was James 2:8-9. Oh well. He did better than all but 1 contestant the whole afternoon.
This is the entire group. It was really inspiring to see these young people eagerly memorizing God's Word, and we pray that His Truth will lodge in their hearts to guide them all the rest of their days!