Hiding In Plain Sight

I fell in love with a girl the summer after my freshman year of college. It was six months after my dad decided to move the family back to Texas after nearly a decade of growing roots in Atlanta, GA, and even though I was at Baylor University I just wasn't ready to give up on the Jewel of the South quite yet.

Through the magic of AIM I kept in touch with my best friend Nick's older brother Michael who had worked at a day camp the summer before and knew they were hiring. Sensing an opportunity for one last goodbye to the city where I grew up, I asked him to recommend me for the job of day camp counselor- a position fraught with responsibility and even danger. More liability than danger, perhaps, considering there was a low ropes course and climbing wall involved, not to mention the zip line.

Since my family no longer lived in our beautiful green house with the white trim and front porch I imagined I would bring dates home to my senior year if I have been confident enough to ask girls to come over, I was fortunate enough to live rent free at the home of some family friends. The Schneiders went to our church and their kids went to the private school I graduated from in the class of '01.

Their older son was away for the summer doing an internship or some such thing that people do after their sophmore year at Harvard. He was the member of the family I was closest to, since he was just a year older than me and friends with my brother Ben. I also pretty much idolized him because he was everything I wasn't in high school. If Zach Morris was real and half Korean, then he would be Johann Schneider. Which I suppose made me Screech.

But as I said, Johann wasn't home this summer, which meant I spent the majority of my non-working hours playing video games with his little brother Justin who was still in junior high and already well on his way to being cooler than I could ever hope to be. He's at Notre Dame now on a track scholarship. I ran a half marathon this year and was beaten by my friend Bryan who was wearing nothing but longjohns.

The rest of my time was spent becoming acquainted with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I previously thought was lame and later discovered was one of the best written shows in history, and avoiding Shiloh, Justin's older sister who was killing time before going off to surf camp in California. Shiloh was like something out of a Beverly Cleary novel in terms of annoying bratty sister-ishness. She had a pet turtle and a pet bird and her favorite band was Blink-182, and she could have taught a clinic on classic middle child attention seeking behavior.

And of course I completely fell for her. I remember the exact moment it happened. My brother Ben proposed to his girlfriend that summer, and it was during this time period that the computer game The Sims was at the height of its popularity. This made for a perfect excuse for me to get hooked on Justin's copy of the game; here was an opportunity to simulate my brother's potential married life. It was during one of these sessions of turning my future sister-in-law into a professional cat-burglar that Shiloh bounded down the stairs and I realized deep down to my core that I would be married to her someday.

It would be a lie to say that the scene is perfectly clear in my mind. I can't say that she was wearing a t-shirt of a rock band I never heard of or that I said something witty and she laughed. All I can remember is that she came down the stairs and her dark hair whipped around because she turned the corner so quickly and she changed my life forever.

That was seven years ago. It took me three and a half of those years to get out of college, one year to save up to get to New York, two years to decide that I wasn't supposed to be there, and one year back in Texas to save up for LA. Shiloh went to USC, got a boyfriend who could've married her if he hadn't been too scared to ask, broke up with him before going on a yearlong worldwide mission trip, and picked up a new boyfriend along the way. He lives in San Diego and she is moving there to be closer to him.

I know all this because I've kept up with her, off and on, ever since that summer. We even met up a few times since then; once when I went to LA for work and another time when she lived in NYC for a summer. Every time we talk she makes jokes about how we will get married someday, never meaning it and never noticing that she is shooting flaming arrows at my heart.

She invited me to come visit her in Atlanta. She's been living with her parents in that same house ever since she got back from her trip three months ago, and I think she only invited me out of boredom. Still, I'm going. With no expectations save a grain of hope that she will see me taking a sharp turn on that basement landing and feel for just one second what I felt seven years ago when she stepped into the deepest part of my soul just by walking into the room, I'm jumping in my car and driving eight hundred miles to have my heart broken at Christmastime. I'm bringing her a present, too. A book by Donald Miller. It can keep her company on the long drive to San Diego.

Spinning Copper into Gold

I was thinking this morning about the story of Jesus in the Temple, watching the people put their offerings in the trumpet shaped receptacles, pointing out the rich showoffs and the poor widow who gave everything she had.

I used to imagine this story with Jesus camped out in the courtyard of the Temple, maybe hiding behind a palm frond, just waiting for a good object lesson to come along that he could spring on his disciples. Kind of like a show on the Discovery Channel. "Today," Jesus would say to the camera,"we're on the lookout for sincere generosity. Ooh, look at that one right there. Beautiful robes, quite the entourage, and ooh, see that big bag of coins! What a guy...oh, and he just tripped over a leper. Kept right on walking."

But that picture doesn't give Jesus enough credit for being supremely aware of his surroundings. In general, we who follow Jesus, and even those who are passably aware of his existence, tend to focus on his omniscience and ignore the fact that Jesus could be surprised just like any other human being. I'm not saying you could or could not walk up behind him and yell "Boo!" That kind of discussion is on par with the Major League argument on whether Jesus could or could not hit a curve ball, which he probably couldn't, considering how few Jewish ballplayers there are today.

My point is that Jesus was adept at incorporating the events going on around him to make a point about heaven, justice, or how life works best. As the widow is walking up to the offering place, Jesus is just wrapping up a tirade against the Pharisees and teachers of the law for being hypocrites and getting a kick out of burning down widow's houses. And right after that, clink-clink, the widow drops her last two pennies into the bucket.

We tend to think of Jesus as a cool customer, always in control, maybe even with an "I knew that was going to happen" smirk that a lifetime of being right would grow on a persons face. But what I love about the humanity of Jesus is the depth of his emotion.

I'm extrapolating big-time here, but I imagine if Jesus were living this story today, rather than leading with "I tell you the truth" he would use the speech of today's audience, with the proper emotional reaction: "SERIOUSLY! Are you kidding me? Did you just SEE that noise? OM Me, tell me that that did not just happen!"

And then he'd explain about giving out of our poverty and even if we aren't broke we should give in secret so that the focus isn't on how awesome we are and how we're wearing Tom's Shoes because we care about Africa. Because Jesus' next question would be to ask us to point Zimbabwe out on a map.

F to the Risco

I'm not looking at it like I'm trapped here anymore, which is good. Rather, it's like one of those riddles about being locked in a room with a dead man, a blog of ice, a squeegie, toxic gas and a copy of Good to Great. It's a problem to solve, and there is a way to do it, the realization is just lagging is all.

My friends and I went to Main Event Entertainment on Sunday, a combination bowling alley, pool hall, arcade, laser tag, ropes course and most importantly, bar, for the venue's soft opening. To get in, all I had to do was assume the identity of high school student Jesse Butera, and pretend I had been on a scavenger hunt with my senior class of '09. Thank God I shaved that day and they didn't ask for ID. I never thought to ask what became of the real Jesse Butera, or how my friend Andrew came into possession of his ticket.

I bowled two games with a fairy tail theme playing on the scoreboard, a spare conjured up a wizard who slashed his wand across the screen. Strikes were rare enough that I do not remember what came up in that instance. Maybe an ogre. Everything was free due to the soft open, so we ordered from the set menu of chicken tenders and sandwiches and tucked in to a meal reminiscent of my actual high school days, right down to the honey mustard dipping sauce, which is to say I'm glad it was free.

Cut-throat at the pool tables came next, where I excelled in mediocrity two games in a row. I took out my frustrations on electronic buffalo in the arcade before mistakenly attempting to shoot bears with a bow and arrow. Rambo the video game gave me insight into the lonely misunderstood veteran as I lived out scenes from Firts Blood. Neither of these games prepared me for laser tag, where I was shot from point blank range from by a fifteen year old girl.

I finished the evening with my first loss at air hockey in recent memory, followed by a short stint shooting terrorists in Time Crisis 4.

The whole four hours I was there, I'm pretty sure I had fun, but honestly, I can't say how.

I've got to get out of here.