Hard Knocks
a Saturday Story
(If you are new to First Light, Saturday Stories are a break from the daily devotional, a chance for you to catch up on your daily Bible reading, and a little fun from life experiences)
Back when I was a young man, when I was capable of being awake past 8:30 at night, when I could “pull an all-nighter” we used to do these things in church we called “lock-ins.” Maybe churches still do that. I wouldn’t know because I’m not awake long enough to find out.
But what we did was invite a bunch of teenagers to spend the night at the church, usually in a gym or fellowship hall area, where we would play games, eat pizza, and possibly watch a movie. We would kick it off around 10 PM and end it around 7 AM the next morning.
When I was the bi-vocational youth pastor at First Baptist Church, Verdigris, I held a few lock-ins with the boys in my youth group. It was small group and I could handle it by myself. We didn’t get into too much trouble except for the time one of them walked across the top of the grand piano in the sanctuary – something I was unaware of them doing until the pianist noticed footprints on it on Sunday morning.
I carried my lock-in experience over into my first pastorate at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church. We didn’t have a youth pastor. Well, we did. I was both youth pastor and senior pastor. The church had just finished building a new fellowship building with a kitchen and large area for eating or sports like basketball and volleyball. We had a lot of good times there.
The first lock-in was a success as far as having a good turn out. Lots of kids came. Tim, one of my deacons, a young man around my same age, came out to help me with everything. We had food and games planned. Everything was going well until Tim and I had a bright idea…
Some of the boys had skateboards they brought with them to the lock in. When it was in the wee hours of the morning, when Tim and I were both sleep-deprived and goofy headed, we came up with a great idea. The entrance into the gym from the older part of the church was by a long ramp. They built that instead of stairs because there wasn’t room for both, and they wanted it accessible to people who might have trouble navigating stairs. That ramp seemed like an excellent launching point for skateboards.
Now, neither Tim nor I were skateboarders in the sense that we could stand on one and ride it with any level of skill. But what we could do is sit on them and get somewhere. So I sat on one, backside down. Tim sat on another one, kneeling on it with his head forward facing. And off we went.
To add to the fun we decided to do it in the dark. The fellowship hall had no windows, so when you turned the lights out it was pitch black. There we were riding around the gym on skateboards in the dark. A very adult thing to do. A good example for all the youth we were supervising I would suggest.
As fate would have it, Tim turned one direction to make his gym loop, and I turned the other. With all of that space to work around, one would think the odds of us occupying the same space at the same time were low. If you though that, you would have thought wrong because our joy ride came to a sudden halt when Tim’s hard forehead slammed into my soft cheek bone.
We both fell over in a heap of pain, lying in close proximity to each other, writhing in agony on the gym floor. One of the kids turned the lights on. There we were a lump forming on Tim’s head, a pool of blood lying beside mine.
We were the only adult supervisors there, so we weren’t going anywhere. I put a towel on mine. Tim put ice on his. We would have liked to cover up the crime, but the damage was going to be evident. It was Saturday and Sunday was coming. Baring a miracle healing, which I was sure the Lord would withhold, we were gonna have some splainin to do.
Thankfully, we were in a church with a group of good natured folks, people who didn’t mind having a little something to hold keep in their pocket for when you got to thinking a little to highly of yourself. There were some lessons in there for me. Mostly I learned “don’t be dumb.” Unfortunately, I have forgotten that lesson a few times since then.
Ha ha ha ha! You brought back some memories for me of some old “all nighters” we had in the youth group I was part of. Some of those experiences are worth remembering and sharing. Some of them best left to the recesses of mine own mind! But I may share…some day.