Understanding in a Car Crash

Sometimes I don't have anything new that I am really excited to write about. Sometimes that is because I still too embarrassed or endangered by my mistake to publicize it - other times it is because I don't find my gaff amusing enough to force the 6 people who somehow accidentally read this to suffer through it.

Today, I am going to take a page out of my Greatest Hits catalog. Today you hear about how my 1998 Pontiac Bonneville ended up teetering on top of a guard rail.

In the summer after my junior year at college, I got a great internship at a great church and spent the summer working with a few good friends and learned a lot from a few excellent teachers. It was also during this summer that I made one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made in youth ministry. This is, of course, how my car ended up perfectly balanced on a guard rail.

Near the end of the summer, the church hosted a vacation bible school. It was a larger church so it was also a larger VBS. As you might expect, us interns were asked to help with the program and spent the week leading games for what seemed like thirteen thousand little kids.

Gladly, we also had the help of a few of the more involved high school students. At the end of the program one night, my friend and fellow intern Robbie allowed one of these students to drive his car to a nearby restaurant where we were all going to grab something to eat and hang out a while. This student only had a learner's permit even though he was a senior, and since I also had a guy who fit that same bill in my vehicle I offered him the same opportunity. 

The guy in Robbie's car had driven with his parents and knew how to drive and was a normal human. The guy in my car had limited experience with go carts.

Having grown up in a more rural environment, I was used to pretty much everyone being experienced drivers by the time they were 12, so I assumed that a reasonably average 18 year old male could handle the job. At this point many would make use of a tired bit of wordplay to tell you what assuming does to a person, but I live in a town named Assumption so that joke has been done in my presence too poorly and too often for me to ever make use of it again.

We made it out of a small part of the parking lot with no more damage done than some jangled nerves, and I was starting to impress myself with my driver education prowess as I guided him around parked cars and away from retaining walls with relative ease. We made our way out to a lightly traveled side road and pulled up to a busy four lane road with a median where we were going to be making a right turn. Yeah, here we go.

I had him wait until there wasn't any traffic before venturing into the intersection and then, boy did he venture. He gave my beautiful Bonneville too much gas and shot us past our turn and into the far lanes before over correcting and turning a complete 180 and heading back in the direction from which we had come.

I feel it is important to note at this point that the name given to the youth ministry at that church was 180. In my mind that name had suddenly turned from a neat turn on the idea of repentance into a horrible sick joke.

We were heading directly towards a power line pole that had been to our right when we started into the intersection. The idea of simply using the brakes had not yet occurred to the driver. In what turned out to be a physics-defying move, he jerked the wheel right before impact and turned us 90 degrees to the left setting us in the exact direction we had originally wanted to go, except that we were not on the road. He had managed to turn the car precisely enough to fit in a space hardly large enough for the car and to get the driver's side wheels to run up a metal guard rail that ran to the ground next to the telephone pole.

He still didn't hit the brakes.

The car drove all the way up onto the guard rail before the wheels fell off and the car's momentum was stopped by a post meeting up with the underside of my car. Quite the rush.

The poor guy was freaking out. I was oddly calm and strangely amused. By the looks of things I had just had a great ride and my only problem was that my car was stranded on a guard rail and my radiator was punctured by a wooden post. The facts that I hadn't done anything illegal and that I had car insurance gave me some false sense of security.

Well, we stood by while a cop came and checked out the situation and a tow truck struggled mightily to remove my car from its perch. All the while, a stream of what was likely more than 100 cars of VBS parents and students slowly passed by, trying to use that same intersection but with one fewer lane to turn into.

Later on a lady from my home church who had moved to the area called my mom and told her the story of how she had driven past the scene where someone (apparently high on something) had driven up onto a guard rail. I wish I could have listened in on my mom explaining that this crazed car owner was her son.

I eventually found out that my frame was bent and my car was totaled, that the parents of the driver had no intention of helping with the cost, and that for the third time in about 4 years I would be buying a new car with no down payment. I was at least able to salvage my sweet CD player.

A while later the driver was at the church using a sledge hammer to break down a cinder block wall and managed to explode his thumb with one swing. I sorta believed in karma for a minute, and I still don't feel guilty that I got some level of pleasure from his pain. People tell me I should.

A youth minister is not a parent. I know that now. I have that line firmly established. As a youth minister I serve as a resource for parents and function most effectively with the support of parents, but I am only taking on the role of the parent for my own children. Driving lessons are being saved for the parents or paid professionals.

I am not sure it really took this experience to teach me that. I had a parent of a student in a previous ministry who was going to 5 or 6 basketball games a week for a while because his daughter was a cheerleader for those games who got upset when I didn't go to any of them. I see the (limited) value in attending those games, but the roles of the youth minister and the parent in supporting the child in such areas are vastly different.

When I teach, I often find myself saying - you can go ask your mom or dad about that. The birds and the bees are firmly in parent territory. So is the specific explanation of physical circumcision. So are a lot of things.

It is great to be involved in the lives of students. Some of the most rewarding relationships I have ever had began that way, but the relationship was never one of father and child. It is different and those on all sides ought to take note of the validity of that fact. I can understand the line getting fuzzy when a student doesn't have functional parental units, but most of the time when conflict in this area arises, it comes from a parent who is actually over involved rather than the alternative.

Where do you draw the line? How do you balance family and ministry? What do you expect of your ministers?

Important questions to ask yourself before you end up with a child in a Bonneville on a guard rail.

Sounds like the end of a game of Clue.

The party is long over, but my indigestion lingers on

I have a short memory. Sometimes it is a gift and sometimes....sometimes it is a curse.

Today, I declare it a curse.

With two young children, you get sleep when you can. If at all possible, I go to bed when I first get tired because I know that they will wake me up before I stop being tired - the only flexibility in the sleep schedule is on the front end.

If you are reading this today, you know that yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday. As I am an American male over the age of 11, I watched the game. I didn't really care who won and based my rooting bias on which team had an alumnus of my favorite college team (Packers running back Brandon Jackson is a former Husker), so I was a fairly passive observer in the game this year. I was really all about the hanging out and the commercials and the food. Oh the food. I love food.

We spent the evening at a friends house with a handful of others and we all brought something to eat. The highlights for me were the sausage and cream cheese wontons (taste like biscuits and gravy) and the cream cheese and meat wrapped pickles (and I don't even like pickles.) Really though, I ate the most from my own personal contributions to the spread - homemade Caribbean Jerk wings and jalapeno popper dip. Yeah, I did that. It was amazing. I won't bore you with the details, but let me assure you - it was my pleasure to overindulge. I washed it all down with a steady stream of Wild Cherry Pepsi - a suitable substitute when Dr. Pepper is absent.

I knew before we left in the third quarter to get our kids to bed that a storm was brewing that would not be calmed. I didn't really eat too much, but the combination of greasy, spicy foods eaten too late in the evening with caffeinated beverages consumed after supper time assured that I would be awake through the night in a sleepless heartburny nightmare before being woken up for good by my children at an unholy hour.

I should have known better.

I have lived this story before. Many, many times. Every time I declare I will not eat for days and will never eat like that again. Until now I have never kept that promise to myself and today it is only because I haven't had enough time for the opportunity to present itself.

Given the opportunity to eschew real food for delicious bowel churning trash... I will do it again. It is always worth it when I am eating and never worth it when I am propping myself up with pillows praying for a few hours of tortured sleep before dawn.

I often challenge students to think and decide rather than just act. I urge them to consider their motivations and the consequences - to be informed and purposeful. I regularly explain how that sort of discipline saves a lot of heartache, and in my case, heartburn.

What was the spread like at your Super Bowl party?
Any favorites?
Any regrets?

Let my igloo be your muse

As is true with much of the country, the town of Assumption Illinois has gotten substantially more snow than usual this winter. Each time it snows, we check to see if it is the right consistency to make a snowman with my son. Three different times, my wife checked it out and had my son and I bundled up and rushing out the door in snowmanticipation only to find out that she had judged the snow incorrectly. We then play around in the snow for a while before going back inside so that getting on all our warm clothing wasn't a total waste of time.

This past week, a few days after the snowpocalypse, we finally got some snow we could work with. Now, this wasn't quite snowman snow, but I quickly judged it capable of forming a sweet snow fort, or, dare I say, a stinkin' igloo.

I ran into the basement and grabbed a sled with a pull string and the two snow brick forms my parents bought for Jack last winter and got to work. I started with the weakly fort we had formed in a previous snow by making a snow pile between a tree and a slide and digging out the middle and got to work shoring it up.

Soon I was slowly making progress, alternating between loads of snow and trips around the yard with Jack in the sled. Once the base was done and I could start setting in rows of bricks, slowing sloping them towards the center, the work went pretty quick. Eventually I made a full arch over the doorway with Jack handing me bricks while I held the sides of the arch in place until the keystone was set.


That was the last help Jack provided. After that point I split my time between the igloo and Jack -- looking up to see he had disappeared and mounting the search to find him in the front yard, convincing him not to climb on or knock down the igloo, and asking him if he was alright as he laid on his side in the snow for more than a quarter hour.

The work wasn't easy, and the day after I am sore all over - but the hardest part was mentally convincing myself to keep working. Jack would have rather knocked it down than sat inside and wasn't all that interested in having a completed roof, so I quickly realized that I was a man of nearly 30 years old making a snow fort for myself.

Soon after I became encouraged that the end was in site, the construction got difficult. I was working on a small space inside the igloo, the snow was getting softer, the sides weren't sticking, and I experienced a few minor cave-ins. I was pretty close to declaring it "close enough."

Then Jack went inside the igloo and suddenly it was cool again. He wanted a ceiling, he liked his igloo. He wanted to help me make bricks and put them in the sled and pull it over. I took a step back and looked at the thing and it actually kinda looked like an igloo. I knew it would come together and it would be worth it if for no other reason than that I could show it off in pictures and give Jack that memory.

Filling in that last section wasn't pretty - it involved a few tries and some oddly shaped snow chunks and at least one frustrated outburst - but I did it. I don't know what use we will get from it, or how long it will even last, but I am pleased it is complete.

Sometimes we invest a lot of time and energy in projects and when the work starts to get tough, or our initial motivation wanes, or we experience set backs and discouragement, we declare it "good enough" and abandon the effort.

How much satisfaction do we miss out on when we close down shop early? How many successes do we turn into failures by cutting bait right before something takes the hook?

I am horrible at encouragement - in fact, if there is an opposite of a spiritual gift, that is what I have in that area - but let me offer this: if the goal is worthy, then perseverance is in order. Oftentimes the hardest bit is the bit right before we taste success. My six month old son Liam cries the hardest just before he gets to sleep. It is the most frustrating part of a given experience and it often doesn't make much sense that the goal would be attained so shortly after such upheaval, but let my igloo be your muse. Because it rules.