[Writer's note [Jill is my official unpaid editor FYI]: as a typical human being, I am feeling a bit nostalgic during this season of dramatic changes. So I will write about the distant past.]
As I wrote last week, we started attending a different church last month. This church has a very charismatic lead pastor. His style of charisma is so reminiscent of my youth pastor. This link gives me very mixed feelings. I might write more about that later. First, the story of my short-lived illegal arms dealership.
During my teenage years, I was very, very involved in my church's youth group. We had a charismatic youth pastor that took an interest in me, and I followed many of his ways. For example, at the time he drove the speed limit in his red 1981 T-top Corvette. So I drove the speed limit. You might say to this: no big deal for you and you probably didn't drive much anyway. To that I say: I didn't ride bikes as a misguided teenager [nobody that I knew did except for Mark Keeler who had 2 bikes in his apartment, but I never saw him ride them. In college, cru leader Loc Ta also had 2 road bikes, which astounded me]. To get to church and soccer and baseball games I had to drive on 880 and 680 which had speed limits of 55 mph at the time. Only me and youth pastor (and perhaps my sister?) drove 55, which is why the speed limit is now 65 or 70 mph. Teammates did not like following me or riding with me. [One time I rode with a teammate in his Rambler through which one could see the road below. That was really scary].
Another example, youth pastor memorized a lot of the Bible and had a system for doing so. I copied that system and memorized a lot. [Much of them and the system is now forgotten].
Every summer the youth group took a missions trip to Ensenada Mexico where we stayed at an orphanage and built homes/churches/etc [Gene Red always drove us in a bus that generally broke down en route]. On the way back home we went to Disneyland or Magic Mountain. And one day we went to town (Tijuana or Ensenada) to shop. The boys bought chiclet and fireworks (M1000s if you dared) and knives. Youth pastor confiscated the M1000s if he found them and then used them as time to wake up alarm. One time he blew a small hole in someone's tent.
During elementary school, I had a friend named Matt who like me collected baseball cards. His goal was to get every Rickey Henderson card ever made. There were a lot! Unlike me, he collected weapons as well. He had Chinese stars, Rambo-style knives, butterfly knives, switchblades, and so on. We watched some ninja movies together. Points to you if you call tell me which movie this line is from:
Dad (ninja) to young son: Remember, you no samurai!
IIRC the son had to become a ninja to save the town.
Anyway, Matt was very cool and his knife collection was a source of awe and fear.
I came to own a butterfly knife on a Mexico missions trip. It's funny how the brain forgets important details such as this: I literally can't recall how I got it. As a terribly shy person (and quite law abiding), I'm pretty sure that I didn't buy from a shop. So I must have bought it from a church friend. I won't even speculate so as to not falsely accuse anyone. In any case, the knife came from Mexico, and I had it in my room in Fremont.
After some short amount of time, I started to feel guilty about owning this 'illegal' item [we didn't have google back then, so I didn't know the law first-hand]. So I wanted to get rid of it. A friend from youth group, Dan, bought it from me [again the details of the transaction are buried too deep to recall. His family visited our home from time to time so I think he bought it from my house].
A very short while later, Dan brought the knife to school and was caught. The principal asked how he got it. He told me that he protected me and that his answer was 'from a kid in Mexico.' That answer has a lot of truth to it if you think about it.
'Whoa', I thought to myself. My conscience (the Holy Spirit?) convinced me to get rid of the knife. But doing so made me break the law even worse. What???!!! [I had not yet read Catch-22]. At the time, I thought to myself, 'of course you didn't rat me out, Dan. I obeyed my conscience.' I was rarely a good friend in my youth.
Recently, I've been wishing that I still had that knife. Maybe I'll buy one some day. Google says they are legal in IL with some caveats. Anyone have one they want to sell me?
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I started writing this post with the intention of writing about the 2 Jeremys from youth group. This is getting too long, so that'll have to wait
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