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.
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