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.