Monday, June 23, 2008

a late-night fight

at roughly 12:15 am, a knocking on the male staff's bedroom door awakened us. 'there was a fight,' declared a adolescent girl with her michigander's accent. we begrudgingly got out of our beds to assess the situation, expecting to find a couple of battered young gentlemen.

it turned out that the fight was between a couple of two-girl gangs, technically the smallest sized gang you can have. this only added to our sleepy stupor.

now, i can merely speculate as to the events that led up to this clash. when we- now acting as police detectives (no mooning was involved)- conducted our interviews with the highly emotional young ladies, our ears were met with high-pitched sobbing and out-of-breath attempts at speech. the frequencies were much too high to allow us to decipher any of their stories.

their youth leader, a 6'7" giant of a man, was fetched to defuse the volatile situation. things began to unfold as we spoke with one of the calmer girls, the only girl whose voice registered with our ears.

somewhere along the line, a girl had angered another one with hurtful words. the offended girl reacted to these harsh criticisms with a slap of the neck and pull of the hair.

when one of the youth leaders inquired as to why she had pulled the hair of and slapped the other girl, the barely holding it together teenager, with much sobbing, replied........

"it was my carnal instinct."

i had much trouble not laughing at this. but i pulled it together.

the other staffers were busy uncovering more of the story. it turned out that some liquid had been poured out over the bed of one of the gangs. a highly tearful and emotional young lady declared, "they poured water all over our beds."

the other girl, coming back down from all of the drama, retorted.....

"that wasn't water. it was pop." (the pop was drawn out with a classic northern accent)

as the behemoth youth minister emerged with his shirt off, we let him take over the investigation. in telling the story to the large, shirtless bear of a man, one of the girls made the mistake of angering him. he started to become very loud.

i began to whisper to him in an attempt to get him to use his inside voice, ushering the lot of them to a room away from the rest of the innocent and sleeping groups of non-gang members.

we sat in the hall way for the next 40 minutes as the situation was resolved. they emerged from the room, teary eyed and exhausted. emotions sure can be draining, am i right or am i right?

the next day, the girls assured me everything was great. they were back to being bff's. if anything, this will make their new, 4-person gang stronger. sometimes you need these little tiffs to get past the speed bumps keeping you from really getting to know someone. it could be seeing their limits, seeing parts of you that are less than flattering. sometimes just seeing your "carnal instinct" out in the open is enough to bring us back to civilization, peace and harmony.

i'll say this: even though they ruptured my eardrums with their boiling-teapot-like voices, they also ruptured the hardness in my heart when they learned to love each other again.
God love em.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

fun with drunks

for the past two weeks i have been busy reconstructing in the nashville area. you can check out reconstruct with the link to the right or by clicking here. reconstruct is a ministry i really do love. though it is exhausting, it is extremely rewarding to see volunteer groups of youth help fix the homes of people in need.

sometimes people don't seem to catch the vision. for instance, just this past week i encountered such a person.

pulling up to the house to check on one of our groups, i noticed a sun-burned, shirtless man in jorts (jean-shorts (tebow)) standing in the front of the lawn yelling at the kids on the roof.

'this should be fun,' i thought to myself. i put the car in park, took a deep breath and opened the door to hear a slurry of what i shall call unfriendly words geared towards me.

it became quite obvious that this man, i'll just call him jerry, was more than a bit inebriated. jerry was covered in a number of strange welts, as if he had rolled around in some type of prickly bushes just for kicks and drunken giggles. when i took a look at the back of his head, i could do nothing but admire the rat tale he must have so painstakingly maintained since the mid-eighties.

the belligerent jerry decided i was to blame for an alleged mooning from two of the kids from this group. the kids denied it, the adults didn't see it but jerry was quite convinced that he had seen to adolescent derrieres exposed in his general direction. he preceded to accost me with a verbal onslaught that would make sailors uneasy, provided those sailors liked to use an excess of profanities and poor grammar.

i apologized more times than i should have, with each attempt to move past this incident resulting in more and more squiffy retorts coming from jerry. it is as if each time i told him it was wrong of those kids to do that, we were very sorry and would punish the children was as offensive as somebody exposing their hindquarters on an unexpected swiller.

as the conversation went on, jerry decided he should call the police. this was just plain silly for him to do. yet the bibber had lost the ability to reason out this situation quite some time ago, judging by the rat tail.

he dialed 911, reported the mooning and talked to me as if i had better get ready for my stay in prison.

thank God he did that. the phone call meant i didn't have to speak with him any more. we would wait for the cops to arrive and let them sort it out.

jerry would yell something at me across the street. i would yell back that we weren't talking until the police arrived. this actually made him a bit sad. it is as if he was a little boy that kept doing something long after i'd asked him to stop, never really believing i would take the toy away. i did take away my ears for him to yell in and my face in which he would waive and point his arms and fingers. yes, he looked a like a sad little boy when i told him to be quiet, a sweaty derelict of a child.

the police finally arrived, as did the higher ups of reconstruct. jerry was greeted by the officer with "we're tired of seeing you jerry. what is it this time?" jerry preceded to lay out his accusations with passion, vigor and absolutely no lucidity whatsoever. it was actually quite fun to watch.

the police officer gave him an option: he could let it go or go to prison for public intoxication. with the wisdom of solomon, jerry opted to drop it. i guess he was less pickled than i originally estimated.

with that, we gave our side of the story. we said that we don't think the kids did what jerry accused them of doing. the officer said, given the chance, he probably would have mooned jerry himself.

he said this with a bit of remorse. as a police officer, he was held to a higher standard and could not go about pulling his pants down towards possible law-breakers. although that would be an interesting crime-fighting tactic. it would confuse the perpetrators. the officer assured us we wouldn't have any trouble from him and went his way.

jerry gave up the dream and didn't bother the crew again.

we went our separate ways. yet i know jerry and i will always have a special bond. it is a connection built on love and sensitivity. he pushed me to the edge of my patience: spitting in my face so generously, nearly poking me oh so many times, etc. i thank him for it.

"jerry," if you're out there reading this, or if you can even read this, i love you man. maybe we can go rolling around in a thicket sometime or i could put some beads on that rat tail of yours. whatever you're up for buddy, i'm game.