I Almost Died. In a Church.

Since half a dozen people have remarked to me in the last few days that I’ve been silent on the ol’ blog front for the last few days, let me explain what’s going on:

I’m dying.

Fine, that may be overstating it a wee bit.

I feel like I’m dying.

After being sick with a fever for a full week, getting roughly an hour of decent sleep in the morning as my exhausted body finally passes out cold after a fitful night of hacking into my pillow, and soaking more pajamas in sweat than I care to admit, I’ve finally succumbed to the doctor’s diagnosis of a bad cold and/or flu that developed into bronchitis.

At 25, this is the first time I’ve ever had this strange affliction. And after mustering the courage to choke down the hot whisky toddy prescribed to me by my boss, I’ve decided that it’s probably the most aggravating thing in existence—after that horrible bagel-slicing machine that chops your bagel up into tiny chip-like pieces.

And, for a short time, I legitimately imagined that I was actually dying. My mental brush with death came as I was sitting in an unheated, pitch-black church sanctuary on a Saturday night.

It’s almost too cliché, really—a church worker, dying in a church?

Two weeks ago, at the persuasion of some friends, I attended a TEC retreat held at an ancient Lutheran church in downtown St. Louis. I came just as an observer to this retreat, called “Teens Encounter Christ”, held twice yearly for teenagers all over the state.

Unfortunately and somewhat ironically, the youth leader who goes a thousand miles-a-minute running retreats with over a hundred people a pop in attendance nearly passed out in a quiet hour of personal reflection.

I arrived at TEC that Saturday morning as happy as a clam…happier than a clam, actually, as not a single person at the retreat could tell if I was a teenage participant or an adult. In fact, they actually carried all of my bags down to the teenage girls’ dorm before realizing that I was an adult. Even the adults questioned me, saying they were “convinced I was 17 or 18”.

I’ve heard that several times in the last year. It’d make me proud, if I didn’t have other kids asking me if I was 35.

By mid-afternoon, I was freezing to death and wearing 3 sweaters—but my body was burning up.

By that evening, as we sat together in the unlit sanctuary and took a few hours to personally reflect on our faith, I was feeling more miserable than I’ve felt in a long time. I sat quietly on a harsh wooden pew, praying for what seemed like an eternity.

After a while, however, I realized that my prayers were focused around three things:

1) Dear God, I haven’t sat in a wooden pew for a long time. I think my buns are going to fall off in sheer protest.

2) Heavenly Father, as much as I love talking to you, I think I’m slowly dying.

3) Almighty Lord, please don’t let me keel over in this pew and die. I actually think I might, and they won’t be able to find me in the dark. They won’t even hear my last words over the guitar solo playing softly in the background.

I dragged myself to one of the retreat counselors and begged for aspirin. I then limped up to the room and collapsed onto my bed for the next few hours.

I woke up so sick that, by late afternoon that next day, I could hardly keep from passing out every time I stood up.

It wasn’t until the worship leader stepped away from his podium at the front of the room to try to catch me as I stumbled and almost tumbled to the ground in a dead faint that I realized I had to go home. And it wasn’t until my mom strong-armed me from a thousand miles away that I went in to see the doctor, later that week.

However, in my lonely and altogether miserable week of convalescence at home, I managed to learn some fascinating new things about selling your home, since HGTV was the only channel that seemed to have anything halfway decent playing while I was in between bouts of gut-wrenching coughing and horrific chills and sweats.

For instance, did you know that, dollar for dollar, a kitchen remodel is the best return on investment in your entire house?

So, there you have it, folks. I’ve been so miserable that I couldn’t even garner up the strength to write lately—as I explained to one of my students the other day, “You know I was truly sick since I didn’t even do a single load of laundry until I was finally on antibiotics.”

The good news is, of course, that now my sleeping schedule is so screwed up that I’m awake at one in the morning, thinking about how I could totally sell this apartment in the blink of an eye.

It’s all about whether you see the glass as half empty or half full, right?

Personally, I’m just glad I’m not seeing a half-full glass of hot toddy. Ugh.

Don’t Judge a Gangsta by His Gold Teeth…

I got a darn good lesson in humility recently.

Tyler and I finished up a vigorous round of shopping–which I absolutely loved and he absolutely hated, incidentally–with a trip to Chipotle, a Mexican restaurant we both love. I was digging into my burrito bowl when the door opened beside our table and the scariest-looking gangsta I’ve seen in a long time came traipsing in.

This dude was intimidating. Seriously.

He was a very large African-American guy, wearing a gigantic leather coat about three sizes too large for him. His jeans were sagging down around his rear end, his dreadlocks were crazily out of control, and his flat-brimmed hat was twisted sideways at just the proper angle (it’s an art, really. It’s a shame I haven’t mastered it myself).

What really marked him as a gangster were the humongous gold pendants and thick gold chains he had hanging around his neck.

I’m no expert, but I’d venture to guess that when your gold pendant is actually larger than a hood ornament on a car, it can aptly be described as “bling”.

I know, I know—how do I know all this slang?

I proudly thank the ghetto flashcards my parents got me as a joke a few years ago.

Incidentally, I once unintentionally left those flashcards on my coffee table when a friend’s sibling was visiting from downtown San Francisco. I didn’t know it at the time, but this sibling was most definitely from the roughest ‘hood in the city and regularly hung out with gangbangers and drug dealers—I now understand why she laughed so hard as she shuffled through the cards, alternately reading them and looking at me shuffling through my iPod’s classical music playlists.

And really, I do listen to rap occasionally–it’s not all Beethoven. Once, I even made a feeble attempt at learning to beatbox and made a recording on my friend’s cell phone answering machine.

I digress—as usual.

Lovely. Your dentist would be so proud...

Anyway, I kept an eye on this thug as he waltzed into the restaurant. I noticed him check out an attractive young woman in line, and he grinned to show off his gold teeth.

Now, there are a few levels of bad boys in my book: wannabe, small-time thug, and gangsta.

This guy was most definitely gangsta.

It could be because I love to watch television shows about criminals, or it could be because I’m probably one of the most cautious people I know—but I’m always highly attuned to everything around me at all times. And when someone walks into a room and seems like they could possibly be a threat, I watch them like a hawk.

So, I kept my eyes on Mr. Gangsta. That way, I could be the first to react if he decided to pull something—you know, start throwing guacamole across the room at innocent victims, raiding the tortilla chip drawer, whatever it is that gangters do to cause mischief and mayhem.

What I noticed, however, actually taught me an important lesson about judging people.

My eyes were so drawn to Mr. Gangsta that I barely noticed the short man beside him—a man in mismatched clothing and shoes too big for his feet. He shuffled in and stood a little too close to the thug decked out in all the bling. He kept his head down and didn’t say a word.

When they finally sat down at the table across from us with their food, I understood why.

The short companion was severely mentally handicapped. And when Mr. Gangsta sat down, I noticed that he had a lanyard around his neck along with a photo ID, identifying him as the handicapped man’s helper.

As they sat down together to eat their meal, Mr. Gangsta was the most attentive companion I’ve seen in a long time. He refilled the man’s drink, fetched him napkins and silverware, and carefully watched to make sure he didn’t spill anything. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying to each other, but Mr. Gangsta laughed frequently and showed off his gloriously gold teeth often.

In short, he appeared to be completely contrary to the rough-and-tumble thug I had originally assumed he was.

I learned an important lesson: just as people shouldn’t judge my bright clothes, blonde hair and blue eyes and think that’s the whole me, neither should I judge a gangsta by his gold teeth.

Now, the crooked hat and bling, maaaaaybe….

The Bane of My Existence: Misspelled Texts from Teens

I woke up yesterday, with just one word in my mind.

You’ll never guess what the word was. Seriously.

Bombastic.

Yep. Bombastic.

Upon thinking of that word, my imagination was instantly captured with images of my high school band director waving his baton madly and urging us to make our fanfare “more bombastic–more, more!”

At the risk of sounding smug, I’d urge you to get out a dictionary and look up the word if you don’t know what it means. I say this only because I’d truly feel guilty for aiding the further decay of the English language by feeding you a definition that you can clearly find yourself.

It’s the same guilty feeling I get when I accidentally mistype a word or forget to use proper punctuation when I’m texting teenagers. Of course, I always spell check when I’m texting my parents (both were imbued with impeccable grammar and spelling talents, which luckily were passed on to me–making that elusive AP English A+ entirely possible in high school. Thanks, Mom and Dad.)

However fanatical I may be regarding my own communication standards, though, it is not usually reciprocated by anyone else (save my aforementioned parents).

Sometimes, I’ll get texts from kids that are pretty darn near unintelligible. It’s the bane of my existence. Take this one, that I received on New Year’s Eve from a ninth-grader:

“Hsappoy nerw ytere!nl”

In Teen-Speak, that translates to “Happy new year!”

My immediate response? “I hope you aren’t drunk.”

The text I received back in the next instant?

“Qwht? Olmg uyr siooo funnmuy!?!”

Translation: “What? OMG, you’re so funny!”

Or, this exchange that took place just a few days ago:

Unnamed student: “i have a horse voice”

Me: “You mean a ‘hoarse’ voice.”

Student: “i cant spell…you know that.”

Me: “You need an English tutor. Probably me, to be more accurate.”

I recently attended a friend’s wedding, where I reconnected with an old college classmate who’s now working as an English teacher at an exclusive high school in Texas. Together, we bemoaned the fact that our favorite subject is being neglected in schools nationwide. As we left, we urged each other to continue to “fight the good fight” and preserve a high standard of proper grammar for future generations.

Yes, I know…you probably think I’m insane. Truthfully, it’s not that I’m so uptight that I get angry–I’m more dismayed that people don’t want to continually further their intelligence.

I’m now three years beyond college graduation, where my “formal education” came to an end. However, that wasn’t the day I stopped learning. To me, that means I am charged with vigorously disciplining myself to read even more voraciously.

I recently finished reading Babbitt, an iconic American work by Sinclair Lewis. And holy cow, even as a lifetime reader (one who devoured Gone With the Wind in three days as a 12-year-old, I might add), I had to look up nearly two dozen words that I had never even heard of in the course of reading that book.

But guess who now has two dozen more words to add to her vocabulary?

While I may never receive those properly spelled texts from my teens, at least I know that The Scarlet Letter is on their required reading list for high school. When I consider that, I feel a little less convinced that the world is going to…

Well…

Look it up.

On A Hamster Wheel and Spinning Madly…

Sometimes, I feel a bit like a hamster running frantically on a little metal wheel.

This weekend, I went to the City Museum, a zany and creative interactive playground in downtown St. Louis, with a few friends and some of my high school students. While there, I had the opportunity to actually jog in a glorified hamster wheel–a contraption I privately think of as “the DeathTrap”. It’s a large, wooden circle that rotates as fast as you can run in it–which, if you really get going, can be pretty darn fast.

Every time I’ve used this thing–usually with a few other people–I’ve ended up falling down and seriously bruising my knees on the hard wood planks and gigantic metal hinges.

Me, my husband, and my brother on the City Museum's wooden "DeathTrap" last spring...the boys may LOOK like they're happy, but we were all secretly fearing for our lives.

I don’t know how hamsters survive. Seriously. How do they get off of those maddening metal wheels?

Do they ever get off?

You can obviously tell I’ve never owned a hamster, right? I seem to have a lot of questions about their lifestyle…

So, back to this DeathTrap machine that skinned up both of my knees with surgical precision this Sunday afternoon. I really did feel like a hamster, frantically trying to keep myself upright while this machine rattled around faster and faster–I kid you not. The only thing missing was the cedar woodchips–which, frankly, are more interesting to me than the actual hamsters. 

Sometimes I wish my bedroom floor was coated in cedar woodchips. What a lovely scent that must be to wake up to each morning.

I digress, as usual.

Today, we had a staff meeting that totally sent me spinning, hamster-style, in a new direction. It’s exciting, confusing, uncertain, and exhilarating all at once. Our staff has a lot to discern and pray about in the coming months.

It’s still messy, and we all have lots of questions…but to me, the most important takeaway is that my church is willing to change in a time when the landscape of religion is definitely changing all over the world. I feel so fortunate to be a part of a staff that’s actively studying culture, striving to be influential and relevant in our communities and world, and is ready to take whatever steps necessary to reach people with the life-saving message of the Gospel–even if it means stepping away from everything we’ve always done, and all of the carefully crafted programs and events we’ve so meticulously created over the last several decades.

Somehow, God managed to place me perfectly at this church. It’s not a church that’s going to bury its head in the sand and let the world pass it by, becoming obsolete; rather, it’s a church that is seeking to understand what’s going on in the world and how it can still be relevant with an eternal truth that the world needs to hear.

Yowzah.

I’m excited for the future of Faith, and I’m looking forward to the new directions that our church will be heading soon. I truly think that God is guiding us–in fact, I think that we’re heading the same direction that a lot of other churches and leaders in the Christian world are heading.

2011–it’s a whole new adventure.

The wheel’s already spinning, friends…