I think I stole today's title from my friend n. But I feel it'll be a good way to catch up on things I did since the events of my latest posts.
1: I can learn lessons from those I'm trying to teach.
While I was a counselor up in Idaho, I had to teach a lesson on obedience. My BC was coming in that evening to observe me. Previous nights we'd learned about faith and hope. I decided to drive home the lesson about why we obey Heavenly Father (because we know he has our best interest in mind and we'll be blessed by it). We started off with a little game of Simon Says. I, naturally, was Simon. I decided to tell them to do things that would benefit me more and more until they refused to obey.
"Simon says touch your toes," I began. I had them complete a few very simple tasks. Then came the turning point. "Simon says give me a dollar." Fourteen wallets were whipped out of fourteen pairs of sagged jeans. Twelve dollars were placed in my hand. One boy asked timidly, "What if I only have a five?"
"Simon says give me that." The five landed atop the other bills in my hand, and was immediately covered by a twenty from the last remaining boy. I took out my wallet and placed all the money inside. "Simon says go clean my room."
In a flash, the boys were gone. I sat in the empty room with my BC. He said laughingly, "Wow, I need to teach more devotionals like this." I explained that I was trying to tell them to do something that they refused to do. He suggested I ask them to do something illegal or impossible. Across the hall, the sound of a half-chant, half-grunt was emanating from my room. I went over there to see what was going on.
It was like a scene from a college-dorm version of Lord of the Flies. The boys had descended upon the room with their war chant, "Ugh! Hah! Ugh! Hah!" and efficiently made my bed, packed my bags, folded my laundry, and emptied the trash. With a cheer, they ran toward where I was standing in the doorway. I fled back to the room where we'd been holding the devotional, and the boys filed in behind me, still chanting.
When they were setlled down, I said, "Simon says kill Sippy!" For illustrative purposes only, I will describe Sippy. That was his last name, but if it were your last name, you'd have to go by it too. It just wouldn't fit you as well. Sippy somewhat resembled a love-sick toad. He had a round face and a broad smile and thick brown curls on his head. My paperwork reported that he suffered from ADSD, but he usually just sat there serenely watching whatever I was doing. As soon as I issued that command, his smiling face disappeared. I don't believe he stopped smiling; I just couldn't see him any more beneath the tumult that immediately surrounded him. The other thirteen boys soon cleared away (except for one tiny guy who had mounted Sippy like a wild boar and was pressing a pillow against his face), and Sippy just lay there, eyes closed and tongue out, obediently dead.
I couldn't figure out where to go next. It would seem pretty dumb to have these kids go through all this and then not be able to tie it into my lesson. I got desperate. "Simon says float in mid-air."
Most of the thirteen surviving boys formed a huddle in the middle of the room, and then after conferring for a moment like Huey, Dewie, and Louie, they began to lift each other off the ground. A few of the others began to hang from the bunkbeds, the light fixtures, and the doorframes. The room had been changed to the monkey pit at the zoo, with one large dead monkey in the middle. My BC was really amused by all of this.
"Okay, Simon says game over." I decided there was only one way to act like everything had gone as planned and that I'd had a spiritual lesson for them in the game--let them make it up. "So what are we learning about tonight?" I asked.
"Obedience!"
"All right, great. And what did we learn about obedience from this game?"
"That when Heavenly Father asks us to do something, even if it's impossible, we can still do it."
I was suddenly amazed by the simple fath of these young men. It occured to me in that moment, and more as I thought about it later, that I falter so often on the simple commandments, yet here were a bunch of kids who had so much faith in their efy counselor that they would strive to find ways to obey even the most immpossible of commands. I looked to my right and saw Sippy, still dead, but now squirming with the visible desire to make a comment.
"Simon says Sippy's alive again."
"I know what we're supposed to learn from this!" he shouted ecstatically. I nodded for him to go on. "This is just like that one time in the Bible when that guy had to kill his son and then the son was all obedient and then they put him up on the rock thing to kill him and then he lifted up the knife, but at the last second Heavenly Father came and grabbed the knife away [he was acting all of this out as he was speaking] and he was like, 'no, you don't have to kill your son anymore' and Heavenly Father blessed the son because he let him kill him even though he got saved before it happened." All that came out in one breath.
Bless you, Sippy. My heart reached out to him because of his enthusiasm and because he'd made the gospel connection I'd failed to. Abraham and Isaac, of course! We have few better examples of obedience in the scriptures. I told the kids about another Father in the Bible who let his Son be killed, an how the Son had died (just like Sippy! the kids noted) and how he had always shown us how to be obedient. I gave back the kids' money and promised them that if they would always try to find ways to obey Heavenly Father like they had me that night, that they'd always be given the blessings he had in store for them.
So, here are the things I learned that evening from those sagacious boys:
Lesson 1a: You are always God in lessons for your youth. You can't play the devil for a group of 14-year-olds who look up to you.
Lesson 1b: We should be striving to be obedient. The times when it seems the most impossible are really just the times we have to work the hardest.
Lesson 1c: There is a really easy way to get your room cleaned. Just make it a principle of obedience for a bunch of zealous teenagers.
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Lesson 2: It is not our goal to outgrow our dependence on God.
"Heavenly Father, please take this trial from me." Repeat 4,000 times, but with a little more conviction and desperation each time. That sums up my prayers during my teenage years. I finally reached a conclusion: I would have to remove it from myself.
I don't know where this idea of God as training wheels came from in my life. I've always felt that if I were to grow into a being even remotely like God, that there would come a point when God would have to let go of the handlebars in my life and let me ride on my own. I viewed my major trials as tests like the Brother of Jared had with the light in the barges he built. I've just recently typed this all up in a letter to an old mission companion, so I'll copy and paste here in just a moment. First, though, I should say that I finally got these false suppositions out of my head after a lot of prayer and scripture study and especially a particularly grueling conversation with our Session Director, Brother Hinton in Santa Barbara well past bedtime one night.
Here's my new conclusion:
After the brother of Jared built the barges, he noticed three problems with them: we can't steer, we can't breathe, and we can't see. The Lord answered each of these issues in a different way. He takes care of our trials in those same three ways. With the steering issue, the commandment was basically, "I'll take care of it; you just need to have faith to get into the boat and you won't have to do anything else." Someimes we need to relinquish control to the Lord. With the breathing issue, the brother of Jared was given specific instructions about what he should do. The Lord was able to see what needed to be done and tell him to do it. In our lives, we often need to find out what the Lord's will is and go and do it.
It's the last one that is the most interesting, and in the end took the most faith. When the brother of Jared repeated his concern about not being able to see in the ships, the Lord turned it around on him and asked the brother of Jared what he wanted to have done. It seems that most of our major trials in life fall into this set. It is natural to feel like the Lord has abandoned us when he doesn't take care of our problems for us or at least tell us what we should do to work our way through them. But there's something important to remember. It may be up to us to come up with the plan, but that plan needs to include the grace of God. Sometimes we have to go into the mountains to forge our stones, but we still require the hand of the Lord to come and give them light. He always will, too.
That's what I'd been missing! Nowhere in the scriptures does God leave someone alone to fight out his own destiny. So what if God doesn't simply abolish the trials from my life the very moment I ask for them? That doesn't mean I have to face them alone. I might have to say, "Lord, please, I'm willing to do this and this and that, but I can't do that on my own and I need thy help." And you know what? He'll do it. It's not meet that we should be commanded in all things, but it's also not meet that we should try to do anything without the blessing and support of Heavenly Father. We need Him every hour, not just until we're done with him.
Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to write about more things I learned this summer, but for now it looks like my time is up on the library computer. no time to proof-read, either. Bye!
Showing posts with label efy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label efy. Show all posts
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Summer of Love
Week 2.5?:
After business meeting on Saturday of that last week, I decided to get up and announce that I needed a ride back to SLC. Before I could get up there, though, my co-counselor (whom I couldn't stand) offered to give me a ride home. It was a bummer, but she was effectively muzzled when I put in the soundtrack to Les Miserable. "You'd better sing along if you're going to put that in," she commanded. "But of course," I acquiesced. "It's WAY better than talking to you," I imagined myself saying. The timing was perfect, and by the time we got to the Gateway Mall, Val Jean was just dying.
The Ring Bearer was there. He took me to California. We stayed at my brother Ouija's house. We found my friend Hero and he hung out with us a bunch. We did the San Francisco thing, Toured the Jelly Belly Factory ("'Best Factory Tour in the USA' --Readers' Digest 2005" boasts the sign), and watched season one of 24 all the way through with breaks only for the bathroom. That's officially my new favorite TV show. At some point I offended Flavor's best friend by inadvertantly calling her "ho." Whoops. I really need to watch that. I went to institute, and a girl there was all, "Hey, do you want a car?" and I said "Heck yes I do," so she gave me one. A brown Cadillac Sedan Deville that runs great! I was so glad. I drove the car back to Ouija and Flavor's house and in the morning left for the airport with the Ring Bearer. Threw up in the airport. I always seem to do that. On the other end Kevin and Kylee, our coordinators, picked me up. I was the first BC to arrive.
BC stands for "Building Counselor," though I always told the kids it was "Boss Counselor." That's "building" as in edifying, not edifice. The differences between being a BC and being a counselor are many. BCs are counselors over the counselors. Rather than have a group of teenagers (we call them participants), I had a group of counselors every week. It was my responsibility to sit in on their lessons and devotionals and make sure they were teaching well and appropriately, teach them my own lessons every morning before the kids wake up and every afternoon during free time, deal with heavy discipline issues, and also run the individual activities and duties of the camp, i.e. the dances, service project, slide show, musical program, lunch duty, etc. We had six lists of all the BC duties, and rotated through all of them during our six weeks.
EFY Week 3: Galke
Brother Galke was our session director this week. I had him last year, too, and he was my least favorite. Now, everybody else loved him. Everybody. But he really rubbed me the wrong way last year. This year he didn't do any of the specifics that drove me so nuts last year, which was good.
I should take a moment to tell you about all the other BCs, since these are the people my summer pretty much revolved around.
Jon: Jon was actually my roommate last year at efy. He's one of the funniest people I know. We play off each other very well. He and I had agreed to write a book about a fictional sister missionary called "We Had a Miracle Today!" I'll have to remember to write in here about when we were in charge of the service project. Anyway, he also sings like Josh Groban, so we heard him singing a lot this summer. I'm a big fan of this guy.
Shelley: Shelley was the sporty, outdoorsy BC. She's a humongous Disneyland nut, I grew very close to her. She's one of the funniest girls I know. Every week she would go to a youth testimony meeting and then come back and report all the funniest parts, and it was always a highlight of my week. She and Jon hooked up immediately, a move I totally support.
Jessica: Jessica is a cute-as-a-button girl who makes me laugh a lot. She confided in me her crushes. We always had great discussions. She was really good at her job, too, which I appreciated. We joke about the idea that we'll be co-coordinators next year, since we're the only northern Californian BCs from this year.
Michelle: Michelle often made me feel like my opinions were invalid or inappropriate. She would dismiss me to other people like, "Oh, that's just him." She really did add a calming influence to everything, though, and the week she took off I definitely missed her. As of this writing, she's gotten married.
Jonathan: Jonathan was one of the most fascinating things to happen to me this summer. This kid had the most bizarre opinions about things. And they aligned with my own almost invariably. From our quirky taste in music to the fact that neither of us says the pledge of allegiance, we kept surprising each other with the parallels in our personalities and lives. He's overcome ridiculous trials to be where he is. It was a huge blessing for me to find someone who was so eerily similar to myself.
My BC weeks were pretty run-of the mill every time, but I'll share the things that were different about each.
I had a counselor whom we'll call Jared, since that was his name, who was really, really bad. He hadn't read his manual, he was teaching his own freaky opinions as doctrine, he yelled at his kids for no reason, and he was Asian. That last one wasn't really related to the other ones, but I thought it would be funny to list it like that. Anyway, his kids were miserable, and I knew right away that the guy would soon have to go. I observed his Monday-night devotional, which was ostensibly about faith. Instead, he challenged his boys to approach girls who were dressed immodestly and inform them that nobody appreciated when they dressed like that. I had talk after talk with the coordinators about his progress. I recommended that he be terminated, but they wanted to give him an ultimatum, which I did. I saw improvement in the areas about which I talked with him, but the problem was that there were just too many problems to be able to correct them all in the six weeks he'd be with us. Anyway, more on Jared later.
I'm going to stop talking about this week, except to say that I was surprised at the poor quality of the counselors I had. I was wondering if I was being to harsh on them, but subsequent weeks proved that the good ones were indeed there, and that by some fluke I had been assigned all the problem counselors for these first two weeks. Oh, and also, I'm really proud of the slide show I put together of that week. I wish I still had it.
EFY Week 4: Music
I was in charge of the singers this week. That was cool. In every fireside, the session director has a counselor sing a song from the EFY CD. It's mostly very poppy poopy music, but we counselors still clamour for the opportunity to get up in front of all those kids and share the spirit through our talents.
Our session director this week was a timorous man who'd brought along his wife. She was definitely more outgoing and fun, though she hit a wall near Tuseday night and was NOT fun to be around for a few days in there. Anyway, she's a singer, so she got very involved in the selction process with me and also with Jonathan's musical program. That was all right with me, I guess. This is more like my journal people, with reminders for myself of what happened rather than making it interesting for everyone else, so sorry if this is more boring than my usual entries.
Thursday nights after the big devotionals on the atonement and testimony meetings, we would all (BCs, coordinators, session director and wife, health counselors) get together for whatever sort of activity the session director wanted. When it was Brother Galke's turn the week before, he used this as a chance to let his hair (and standards) down. I think he was trying to show us that he was cool and wasn't efy all the time. He told off-color jokes. Most of us were insulted. There was an attitude of "Okay, the kids are gone, now we can drop the whole spiritual act.
It was the exact opposite this next week. The session director had an attiude of "okay, the kids are gone, now we can get into the deeper doctrines." I really liked that. I learned a lot about the enabling power of the aonement from him, and how Christ doesn't just make bad men good, but good men better. I set some goals that week.
There was a mural in the building where we did all our dances and classes and things that depicted a lot of naked people standing in a circle naked. The university offered to cover it up for $100/day. We declined their generous offer. I took a picture of us BCs standing in front of it in the same pose for the slideshow. I set it as the desktop for our efy computer and offered to change it for just $100/day. That should say something about how cool the people I worked with were. Most counselors would have been offended, but my bosses and co-workers all thought it was great.
Independence Day was on that Monday, and we gathered all the kids on the roof of a nearby parking garage for the fireworks. It was really cool.
This week my favorite counselor, Seth, left us, and instead we got a new one named Aaron, who was even more of a handful than Jared. He was continually sleeping through meetings, keeping his boys up WAY past bed time, and I even walked in on him passing around dirty jokes that he's printed online. There were gay, sexist, bestiality, and racist jokes in there. I couldn't believe it. His devotionals were long and boring. The next week he was off to Flagstaff, so I sent a message ahead of him for his BC and coordinators there to keep an eye on him. More on him later, too.
In fact, more on all of this later. Time for In-N-Out and In-Sti-Tute. Chao Pescados.
After business meeting on Saturday of that last week, I decided to get up and announce that I needed a ride back to SLC. Before I could get up there, though, my co-counselor (whom I couldn't stand) offered to give me a ride home. It was a bummer, but she was effectively muzzled when I put in the soundtrack to Les Miserable. "You'd better sing along if you're going to put that in," she commanded. "But of course," I acquiesced. "It's WAY better than talking to you," I imagined myself saying. The timing was perfect, and by the time we got to the Gateway Mall, Val Jean was just dying.
The Ring Bearer was there. He took me to California. We stayed at my brother Ouija's house. We found my friend Hero and he hung out with us a bunch. We did the San Francisco thing, Toured the Jelly Belly Factory ("'Best Factory Tour in the USA' --Readers' Digest 2005" boasts the sign), and watched season one of 24 all the way through with breaks only for the bathroom. That's officially my new favorite TV show. At some point I offended Flavor's best friend by inadvertantly calling her "ho." Whoops. I really need to watch that. I went to institute, and a girl there was all, "Hey, do you want a car?" and I said "Heck yes I do," so she gave me one. A brown Cadillac Sedan Deville that runs great! I was so glad. I drove the car back to Ouija and Flavor's house and in the morning left for the airport with the Ring Bearer. Threw up in the airport. I always seem to do that. On the other end Kevin and Kylee, our coordinators, picked me up. I was the first BC to arrive.
BC stands for "Building Counselor," though I always told the kids it was "Boss Counselor." That's "building" as in edifying, not edifice. The differences between being a BC and being a counselor are many. BCs are counselors over the counselors. Rather than have a group of teenagers (we call them participants), I had a group of counselors every week. It was my responsibility to sit in on their lessons and devotionals and make sure they were teaching well and appropriately, teach them my own lessons every morning before the kids wake up and every afternoon during free time, deal with heavy discipline issues, and also run the individual activities and duties of the camp, i.e. the dances, service project, slide show, musical program, lunch duty, etc. We had six lists of all the BC duties, and rotated through all of them during our six weeks.
EFY Week 3: Galke
Brother Galke was our session director this week. I had him last year, too, and he was my least favorite. Now, everybody else loved him. Everybody. But he really rubbed me the wrong way last year. This year he didn't do any of the specifics that drove me so nuts last year, which was good.
I should take a moment to tell you about all the other BCs, since these are the people my summer pretty much revolved around.
Jon: Jon was actually my roommate last year at efy. He's one of the funniest people I know. We play off each other very well. He and I had agreed to write a book about a fictional sister missionary called "We Had a Miracle Today!" I'll have to remember to write in here about when we were in charge of the service project. Anyway, he also sings like Josh Groban, so we heard him singing a lot this summer. I'm a big fan of this guy.
Shelley: Shelley was the sporty, outdoorsy BC. She's a humongous Disneyland nut, I grew very close to her. She's one of the funniest girls I know. Every week she would go to a youth testimony meeting and then come back and report all the funniest parts, and it was always a highlight of my week. She and Jon hooked up immediately, a move I totally support.
Jessica: Jessica is a cute-as-a-button girl who makes me laugh a lot. She confided in me her crushes. We always had great discussions. She was really good at her job, too, which I appreciated. We joke about the idea that we'll be co-coordinators next year, since we're the only northern Californian BCs from this year.
Michelle: Michelle often made me feel like my opinions were invalid or inappropriate. She would dismiss me to other people like, "Oh, that's just him." She really did add a calming influence to everything, though, and the week she took off I definitely missed her. As of this writing, she's gotten married.
Jonathan: Jonathan was one of the most fascinating things to happen to me this summer. This kid had the most bizarre opinions about things. And they aligned with my own almost invariably. From our quirky taste in music to the fact that neither of us says the pledge of allegiance, we kept surprising each other with the parallels in our personalities and lives. He's overcome ridiculous trials to be where he is. It was a huge blessing for me to find someone who was so eerily similar to myself.
My BC weeks were pretty run-of the mill every time, but I'll share the things that were different about each.
I had a counselor whom we'll call Jared, since that was his name, who was really, really bad. He hadn't read his manual, he was teaching his own freaky opinions as doctrine, he yelled at his kids for no reason, and he was Asian. That last one wasn't really related to the other ones, but I thought it would be funny to list it like that. Anyway, his kids were miserable, and I knew right away that the guy would soon have to go. I observed his Monday-night devotional, which was ostensibly about faith. Instead, he challenged his boys to approach girls who were dressed immodestly and inform them that nobody appreciated when they dressed like that. I had talk after talk with the coordinators about his progress. I recommended that he be terminated, but they wanted to give him an ultimatum, which I did. I saw improvement in the areas about which I talked with him, but the problem was that there were just too many problems to be able to correct them all in the six weeks he'd be with us. Anyway, more on Jared later.
I'm going to stop talking about this week, except to say that I was surprised at the poor quality of the counselors I had. I was wondering if I was being to harsh on them, but subsequent weeks proved that the good ones were indeed there, and that by some fluke I had been assigned all the problem counselors for these first two weeks. Oh, and also, I'm really proud of the slide show I put together of that week. I wish I still had it.
EFY Week 4: Music
I was in charge of the singers this week. That was cool. In every fireside, the session director has a counselor sing a song from the EFY CD. It's mostly very poppy poopy music, but we counselors still clamour for the opportunity to get up in front of all those kids and share the spirit through our talents.
Our session director this week was a timorous man who'd brought along his wife. She was definitely more outgoing and fun, though she hit a wall near Tuseday night and was NOT fun to be around for a few days in there. Anyway, she's a singer, so she got very involved in the selction process with me and also with Jonathan's musical program. That was all right with me, I guess. This is more like my journal people, with reminders for myself of what happened rather than making it interesting for everyone else, so sorry if this is more boring than my usual entries.
Thursday nights after the big devotionals on the atonement and testimony meetings, we would all (BCs, coordinators, session director and wife, health counselors) get together for whatever sort of activity the session director wanted. When it was Brother Galke's turn the week before, he used this as a chance to let his hair (and standards) down. I think he was trying to show us that he was cool and wasn't efy all the time. He told off-color jokes. Most of us were insulted. There was an attitude of "Okay, the kids are gone, now we can drop the whole spiritual act.
It was the exact opposite this next week. The session director had an attiude of "okay, the kids are gone, now we can get into the deeper doctrines." I really liked that. I learned a lot about the enabling power of the aonement from him, and how Christ doesn't just make bad men good, but good men better. I set some goals that week.
There was a mural in the building where we did all our dances and classes and things that depicted a lot of naked people standing in a circle naked. The university offered to cover it up for $100/day. We declined their generous offer. I took a picture of us BCs standing in front of it in the same pose for the slideshow. I set it as the desktop for our efy computer and offered to change it for just $100/day. That should say something about how cool the people I worked with were. Most counselors would have been offended, but my bosses and co-workers all thought it was great.
Independence Day was on that Monday, and we gathered all the kids on the roof of a nearby parking garage for the fireworks. It was really cool.
This week my favorite counselor, Seth, left us, and instead we got a new one named Aaron, who was even more of a handful than Jared. He was continually sleeping through meetings, keeping his boys up WAY past bed time, and I even walked in on him passing around dirty jokes that he's printed online. There were gay, sexist, bestiality, and racist jokes in there. I couldn't believe it. His devotionals were long and boring. The next week he was off to Flagstaff, so I sent a message ahead of him for his BC and coordinators there to keep an eye on him. More on him later, too.
In fact, more on all of this later. Time for In-N-Out and In-Sti-Tute. Chao Pescados.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Summer Of the Monkeys
Okay, that's a pretty arbitrary name for my summer, but I like it.
Time for the update, huh? Well, here’s a play-by-play of the whole time I’ve been gone.
Week 0: Colorado
We went to visit Mom and the maggot. Originally I had remembered so many hilarious things that happened then, but I’ve kinda forgotten all the things I was supposed to remember. Sorry, guys. I went with the Ring Bearer, Wiggle, Ronnie, Racherella, and Pinetree. It was a really good group to be there with. We went to Estes Park and saw these little shoppes and had delicious chocolate. We went to the Dam Store and bought t-shirts, toured the statue parks, did the whole Denver thing with their 6th Street mall. Ok, funny part: We ate at this restaurant there to wait for the rain to stop so we could go to Six Flags. While we were there Hyrum engaged us in a story about a friend who has a medical problem that grants him a bloody nose instead of an erection whenever he becomes sexually aroused. At this moment there were peals of laughter from the table behind us. We realized there was a young couple who’s been listening the whole time. We felt sheepish, but the couple said it was fine and engaged us in conversation. We went to Six Flags’ Elitch Gardens and went straight to the waterslides. We rode one and were headed for the wave pool before it stated hailing and we all had to huddle in the musty locker rooms with all the other freezing people. There was an incident with the locker that took some time and was a large part of the reason that we only had time for one slide. And there was some kind of WalMart drama, too, but I don’t remember the details. The moral of the locker part of the story is that Ronnie was able to strut over and get us immediate help from some guy. In fact, she was able to do that at every point during the trip. We decided it’s definitely to our advantage to have such a hot girl with us always. We went on roller coasters after that for a while, except for the Ring Bearer, who was having a major personal crisis and went to Denver by himself. While waiting in line for a roller coaster, the girls started discussing the symmetry of the boys’ nipples when we heard a familiar laugh. Next to us in line was that same couple from the restaurant. We ended up having about a dozen such encounters with them. Also in Colorado, Mom made porcupines (my favorite food), we played rodeo with the adorable maggot, and things were all-around great. That was a pleasant and relaxing week all around.
When I got back to Provo we had a farewell party during which we watched Into the Woods. My friends did not seem to appreciate it. Losers.
EFY Week 1: Problems
My first two weeks this year I was a counselor, and I must say I’ve never experienced so much crap in one week of efy. I had a poindexter boy with an eating disorder, a tiny manically depressed boy who threw a fit during testimony meeting (“This is so boring! They’re all just saying the same things!” and then throwing hymn books at the girls), a kid who showed up at one in the morning, a kid who did nothing but brag about all the girls’ boobs he’d felt up and all the gay kids he was going to sneak out to go beat up, etc. One boy was very nice and spiritually advanced but hadn’t yet been taught about deodorant. So I made my little guy come with me to a class about inner beauty and sat with him at meals, sat and read the scriptures with the manically depressed kid and let him sleep extra each morning, assigned some girls to make sure the late boy felt included in everything, had a special talk with all the boys about how we treat women and gay people, and then an extra special talk with the boy who’s been talking so tough about how I wasn’t going to let him ruin the week for everyone else. I bought several sticks of deodorant and told the kids that I had deodorant to get them all spiffed up for the dances and things, and was pleased to see that a few of them took them. That was the beginning.
Tuesday night I awoke to the tattoo of small knuckles on my door. It took me several moments to orient myself and open the door. There stood my little anorexic boy (he was the smallest kid at efy by far and had only turned 14 the day before efy started).
“Something’s wrong with my room.” His words came to me through a thick haze of sleep.
“What?” I said, in a squinty voice.
“Something’s wrong with my BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP.”
When the smoke alarm went off in my room, the kid had my full attention. I jumped out of bed and went into the hall. I hate this story.
So down the hall at the kid’s room were his other three roommates, wrapped in blankets and peering in through their doorway, from which prodigious tufts of blue smoke were billowing and filling the hall. I ran down there and looked into the room, but it was so full of the blue smoke that I couldn’t even see the back wall. I ran and awakened the other counselors and together we evacuated the hall. The police were summoned, huge fans were brought in to clear the place of smoke, and the Head Resident played bad guy for about an hour trying to get information from the boys. It turns out someone had slipped a brick-sized smoke bomb through the kids’ window. My boys all smelled like smoke for the rest of the week. The walls of their room had to be repainted, the carpets cleaned, and special chemicals brought in to rid the place of the miasma. Nobody knows why my smoke alarm down the hall was the only one to issue the clarion call.
Wednesday evening one of my kids lost his wristband and I had to go with him to the office to get him a new one. Naturally, the office was closed when we got there, so as we were on our way back to our company (group in efyspeak), we passed two curmudgeonly police officers.
“Hey, you work for efy, I need to find a So-and-So and a So-and-So.”
Except he didn’t say “So-and-So,” he said the names of two of my boys. They had me get in the cop car and ride with them to the spot where the rest of our company was preparing their cheer. They made the two kids get into the back of the cop car. The more vociferous of the two didn’t let anybody forget that it was his birthday that day. Anyway, I had to accompany the boys to the dorms, where the cops interrogated them for about an hour. The boys’ parents were summoned, the coordinators and session director and my BC were all involved, but nobody was letting us talk to the boys. In the end we found out that they had been mistakenly singled out as the suspects in the smoke bomb incident instead of being filed as “persons of interest,” the cops had nothing on them, and they were free to rejoin the group. It was a pretty traumatic incident for all involved, though, (Staci had to tell the cops off, which was great), and the two boys exhibited a newfound spirit of contriteness for the remainder of the week. Birthday boy was the selfsame braggart who’d been lauding his past transgressions all week, so the whole miscommunication with the police had come to be a blessing. Besides the minor fight that broke out later that week, nothing else really happened that fateful week. Oh, yeah, except for all the NORMAL activities and crap that I had to do as part of my job. Friday for the banquet I got out my hair glue and took all my little dweebs and did their hair all spiky and let them borrow my clothes. They were studs. My anorexic hobbledehoy was asked to dance every single slow song. All in all, the week was a success.
Brother Johnson, our session director had encouraged us to focus on needing the Savior every hour on the first day he’d been there. “I need thee every hour” became my mantra. I know it’s because of the help I got from the Savior that week (really I was only helping Him, and feebly) that I was able to survive at all. The “every hour” part took on a new meaning when it seemed that literally every hour presented a new humongous problem, and the hour was any hour at all, all through the day and well into each night. That whole week was a great way to consecrate myself for the weeks to come.
EFY Week 2: Bond
I have less to say about the weeks where everything went right. This was one of those. Maybe I’ll just tell the story of Chris for this week.
Chris was a quiet Mexican kid. He had a beanie that covered his long hair, and he wore it everywhere. He never smiled, and always wore a flat, lugubrious expression on his sallow face. But there was something different about Chris. When we were in devotionals, he always knew exactly where I was going with the lesson. He could explain advanced gospel principles with lucidity, and invariably drove home the application of the lesson for each of the other boys. The other boys quickly grew to revere him. My only question was, “why the demeanor?” Thursday evening I decided to just ask him.
“What’s happened to you in your life, Chris?” I asked after another set of stunningly perspicuous explications (this time on the atonement).
He just looked at me lachrymosely for a few moments, then began to explain that his dad and grandmother had both recently died, and now he, at 14, had been consigned responsibility for his mother and little brother. My heart broke as I listened. When he finished, I told him that I was favorably impressed by him. I told him about my Aunt Laura, who used the terrible things that happened to her as an excuse to perpetuate the mess her life was in. I commended him for turning instead to the Lord.
The next day, Chris displayed a much more sanguine disposition. He told us that he’d been sick all week and hadn’t wanted to cause problems by telling anyone. He also confided in me that he had a goal to save up enough money when he got home to go get a haircut so he wouldn’t have to wear that nasty beanie anymore. He’d worn the beanie out of shame about his long hair.
Meanwhile, the boys in my group formed a stronger bond than I’ve ever seen in a group. All of them were leaders, all of them committed to living a more excellent way. I’m teary-eyed on my end here while I remember those boys. My Friday devotional was the best I’ve ever taught. I asked only one question: “What are your goals for when you get home?” The boys extrapolated on that topic for half an hour, challenging each other to reach the rank of Eagle Scout and get their Duty to God awards, obey their parents, read their scriptures daily, pray and serve more meaningfully, seve missions, and follow up with each other. They shared scriptures and insights and bore testimony. All the boys were crying like it was Girls’ Camp or something. There was a definite Spirit of Brotherhood there, brotherhood as an actual force, and it strengthened my testimony of priesthood and our preexistence.
I had a neat prayer for those boys when it was time to send them home. I was sobbing, terrified at the prospect of sending them back out into the world to face the inevitable abuses of life, and at my own inability to shield them further. I was given a whelming reassurance and reminder that they already have Someone far more qualified to take away their pains and succor them in their trials. I know those kids are all right, wherever they are.
This grows too long. More tomorrow.
Time for the update, huh? Well, here’s a play-by-play of the whole time I’ve been gone.
Week 0: Colorado
We went to visit Mom and the maggot. Originally I had remembered so many hilarious things that happened then, but I’ve kinda forgotten all the things I was supposed to remember. Sorry, guys. I went with the Ring Bearer, Wiggle, Ronnie, Racherella, and Pinetree. It was a really good group to be there with. We went to Estes Park and saw these little shoppes and had delicious chocolate. We went to the Dam Store and bought t-shirts, toured the statue parks, did the whole Denver thing with their 6th Street mall. Ok, funny part: We ate at this restaurant there to wait for the rain to stop so we could go to Six Flags. While we were there Hyrum engaged us in a story about a friend who has a medical problem that grants him a bloody nose instead of an erection whenever he becomes sexually aroused. At this moment there were peals of laughter from the table behind us. We realized there was a young couple who’s been listening the whole time. We felt sheepish, but the couple said it was fine and engaged us in conversation. We went to Six Flags’ Elitch Gardens and went straight to the waterslides. We rode one and were headed for the wave pool before it stated hailing and we all had to huddle in the musty locker rooms with all the other freezing people. There was an incident with the locker that took some time and was a large part of the reason that we only had time for one slide. And there was some kind of WalMart drama, too, but I don’t remember the details. The moral of the locker part of the story is that Ronnie was able to strut over and get us immediate help from some guy. In fact, she was able to do that at every point during the trip. We decided it’s definitely to our advantage to have such a hot girl with us always. We went on roller coasters after that for a while, except for the Ring Bearer, who was having a major personal crisis and went to Denver by himself. While waiting in line for a roller coaster, the girls started discussing the symmetry of the boys’ nipples when we heard a familiar laugh. Next to us in line was that same couple from the restaurant. We ended up having about a dozen such encounters with them. Also in Colorado, Mom made porcupines (my favorite food), we played rodeo with the adorable maggot, and things were all-around great. That was a pleasant and relaxing week all around.
When I got back to Provo we had a farewell party during which we watched Into the Woods. My friends did not seem to appreciate it. Losers.
EFY Week 1: Problems
My first two weeks this year I was a counselor, and I must say I’ve never experienced so much crap in one week of efy. I had a poindexter boy with an eating disorder, a tiny manically depressed boy who threw a fit during testimony meeting (“This is so boring! They’re all just saying the same things!” and then throwing hymn books at the girls), a kid who showed up at one in the morning, a kid who did nothing but brag about all the girls’ boobs he’d felt up and all the gay kids he was going to sneak out to go beat up, etc. One boy was very nice and spiritually advanced but hadn’t yet been taught about deodorant. So I made my little guy come with me to a class about inner beauty and sat with him at meals, sat and read the scriptures with the manically depressed kid and let him sleep extra each morning, assigned some girls to make sure the late boy felt included in everything, had a special talk with all the boys about how we treat women and gay people, and then an extra special talk with the boy who’s been talking so tough about how I wasn’t going to let him ruin the week for everyone else. I bought several sticks of deodorant and told the kids that I had deodorant to get them all spiffed up for the dances and things, and was pleased to see that a few of them took them. That was the beginning.
Tuesday night I awoke to the tattoo of small knuckles on my door. It took me several moments to orient myself and open the door. There stood my little anorexic boy (he was the smallest kid at efy by far and had only turned 14 the day before efy started).
“Something’s wrong with my room.” His words came to me through a thick haze of sleep.
“What?” I said, in a squinty voice.
“Something’s wrong with my BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP.”
When the smoke alarm went off in my room, the kid had my full attention. I jumped out of bed and went into the hall. I hate this story.
So down the hall at the kid’s room were his other three roommates, wrapped in blankets and peering in through their doorway, from which prodigious tufts of blue smoke were billowing and filling the hall. I ran down there and looked into the room, but it was so full of the blue smoke that I couldn’t even see the back wall. I ran and awakened the other counselors and together we evacuated the hall. The police were summoned, huge fans were brought in to clear the place of smoke, and the Head Resident played bad guy for about an hour trying to get information from the boys. It turns out someone had slipped a brick-sized smoke bomb through the kids’ window. My boys all smelled like smoke for the rest of the week. The walls of their room had to be repainted, the carpets cleaned, and special chemicals brought in to rid the place of the miasma. Nobody knows why my smoke alarm down the hall was the only one to issue the clarion call.
Wednesday evening one of my kids lost his wristband and I had to go with him to the office to get him a new one. Naturally, the office was closed when we got there, so as we were on our way back to our company (group in efyspeak), we passed two curmudgeonly police officers.
“Hey, you work for efy, I need to find a So-and-So and a So-and-So.”
Except he didn’t say “So-and-So,” he said the names of two of my boys. They had me get in the cop car and ride with them to the spot where the rest of our company was preparing their cheer. They made the two kids get into the back of the cop car. The more vociferous of the two didn’t let anybody forget that it was his birthday that day. Anyway, I had to accompany the boys to the dorms, where the cops interrogated them for about an hour. The boys’ parents were summoned, the coordinators and session director and my BC were all involved, but nobody was letting us talk to the boys. In the end we found out that they had been mistakenly singled out as the suspects in the smoke bomb incident instead of being filed as “persons of interest,” the cops had nothing on them, and they were free to rejoin the group. It was a pretty traumatic incident for all involved, though, (Staci had to tell the cops off, which was great), and the two boys exhibited a newfound spirit of contriteness for the remainder of the week. Birthday boy was the selfsame braggart who’d been lauding his past transgressions all week, so the whole miscommunication with the police had come to be a blessing. Besides the minor fight that broke out later that week, nothing else really happened that fateful week. Oh, yeah, except for all the NORMAL activities and crap that I had to do as part of my job. Friday for the banquet I got out my hair glue and took all my little dweebs and did their hair all spiky and let them borrow my clothes. They were studs. My anorexic hobbledehoy was asked to dance every single slow song. All in all, the week was a success.
Brother Johnson, our session director had encouraged us to focus on needing the Savior every hour on the first day he’d been there. “I need thee every hour” became my mantra. I know it’s because of the help I got from the Savior that week (really I was only helping Him, and feebly) that I was able to survive at all. The “every hour” part took on a new meaning when it seemed that literally every hour presented a new humongous problem, and the hour was any hour at all, all through the day and well into each night. That whole week was a great way to consecrate myself for the weeks to come.
EFY Week 2: Bond
I have less to say about the weeks where everything went right. This was one of those. Maybe I’ll just tell the story of Chris for this week.
Chris was a quiet Mexican kid. He had a beanie that covered his long hair, and he wore it everywhere. He never smiled, and always wore a flat, lugubrious expression on his sallow face. But there was something different about Chris. When we were in devotionals, he always knew exactly where I was going with the lesson. He could explain advanced gospel principles with lucidity, and invariably drove home the application of the lesson for each of the other boys. The other boys quickly grew to revere him. My only question was, “why the demeanor?” Thursday evening I decided to just ask him.
“What’s happened to you in your life, Chris?” I asked after another set of stunningly perspicuous explications (this time on the atonement).
He just looked at me lachrymosely for a few moments, then began to explain that his dad and grandmother had both recently died, and now he, at 14, had been consigned responsibility for his mother and little brother. My heart broke as I listened. When he finished, I told him that I was favorably impressed by him. I told him about my Aunt Laura, who used the terrible things that happened to her as an excuse to perpetuate the mess her life was in. I commended him for turning instead to the Lord.
The next day, Chris displayed a much more sanguine disposition. He told us that he’d been sick all week and hadn’t wanted to cause problems by telling anyone. He also confided in me that he had a goal to save up enough money when he got home to go get a haircut so he wouldn’t have to wear that nasty beanie anymore. He’d worn the beanie out of shame about his long hair.
Meanwhile, the boys in my group formed a stronger bond than I’ve ever seen in a group. All of them were leaders, all of them committed to living a more excellent way. I’m teary-eyed on my end here while I remember those boys. My Friday devotional was the best I’ve ever taught. I asked only one question: “What are your goals for when you get home?” The boys extrapolated on that topic for half an hour, challenging each other to reach the rank of Eagle Scout and get their Duty to God awards, obey their parents, read their scriptures daily, pray and serve more meaningfully, seve missions, and follow up with each other. They shared scriptures and insights and bore testimony. All the boys were crying like it was Girls’ Camp or something. There was a definite Spirit of Brotherhood there, brotherhood as an actual force, and it strengthened my testimony of priesthood and our preexistence.
I had a neat prayer for those boys when it was time to send them home. I was sobbing, terrified at the prospect of sending them back out into the world to face the inevitable abuses of life, and at my own inability to shield them further. I was given a whelming reassurance and reminder that they already have Someone far more qualified to take away their pains and succor them in their trials. I know those kids are all right, wherever they are.
This grows too long. More tomorrow.
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