The effects of sleep deprivation on the mind of the Tina

Note: This particular blog contains a bunch of random thoughts: some interesting…some provocative…some, just the product of an old person who stayed up all night!

Well, my blogging friends…I can’t explain why the Martin Luther King, Jr. video never posted to my blog. I tried to post it 4 times…and then got tired of doing the same thing, in the same way, with the same result (didn’t someone claim that as the definition of insanity?) It really is an amazing speech--so I encourage you to go to http://www.youtube.com/ and search for “I Have a Dream Martin Luther King Jr.” and you will find it right away. I can’t say I had ever heard him actually give the speech in its fullness before. I had seen snippets…and one time, in college, someone gave the speech as a chapel presentation. To which, one of my friends was horrified, saying, “What did that have to do with God?” Again, the self-obsessed side of evangelicalism rears its ugly head. We believe that unless a talk/sermon contains the “four spiritual laws”, it is not about God. Our faith is so myopic at times.

Now, for the lock-in. I want to know who came up with the idea of locking a bunch of teenagers in a church, filling them up with sugar and caffeine, and letting them stay up all night? The funniest thing to me is that those kids were drinking coffee! Coffee…at age 13? This was not good coffee, mind you, it was instant (combined with hundreds of packets of sugar). Back in my day, kids drank Jolt and Mountain Dew to stay up all night, not coffee (have you officially passed out of youth when you start saying things like, “Back in my day…”?). The kids are so cute. There was one boy who kept blinking incessantly…he had to blink just to stay awake. Others looked so glassy-eyed and unsteady; you thought they might fall over if they didn’t support themselves on something. Of course, when you asked them, “Are you tired?” they were quick to respond: “No, not at all!” Tiredness is a sign of weakness at a lock-in. Cool people don’t get tired, apparently!

There was a 45 minute window of time where I decided to try to just lay down for a bit. I curled up on my office floor, with my sleeping bag and pillow. Incidentally, I have decided that you are officially exhausted when a hard floor feels more comfortable than the plushest mattress in the world. Sleep, however, did not come…and it was my own fault. Directly underneath the room I was in, was a group of junior high boys, playing “Extreme Spoons”…a game that I, unfortunately, taught them. Extreme spoons is like regular spoons except, instead of having the spoons right in front of you as you play, you place the spoons at some length away from you—so that you have to run for the spoons, when the time comes. All I could hear during my brief “sleep” was giggling (junior high boys giggle worse than a gaggle of girls…that’s a proven fact), followed by the sound of running, tackling, and furniture crashing (if you are a Trustee from church, just remember that I am sleep deprived and none of these events actually happened!!!). Speaking, however, of damaging the church: It felt like, all night, kids just kept handing me pieces of the church. One time, it was a hymnal rack that used to be under a pew…another time it was the door handle off the Sunday school sliding room divider…then the basement started to flood (but, I can’t blame that on the kids…just this RIDICULOUS amount of rain in Columbus). Amazingly, Hopewell UMC has existed for 201 years…and in one night, we almost destroyed the building (again, trustees, I really am sleep deprived!). I finally decided to get up from my “nap” when I heard the same “extreme-spoon” playing junior high boys, upstairs, walking amongst the sleeping bags in the next room, waking people up, saying: “We’ve been up all night!...all night! We didn’t sleep at all”. They sounded just as proud of that fact as anyone who climbed Everest would sound of their feat of strength and endurance. For some reason, it is a crown of glory in the junior high world to be able to stay up all night. Ah, the naïveté of youth.

The highlight of my night was playing Euchre for hours with three of my adult helpers (of course, my partner would not “milk” me when we got “in the barn”…it made me miss you BB, my beloved Euchre partner of old!). We giggled like a bunch of school kids. I have not laughed like that in a long time…my abs actually hurt today. Get a bunch of sleep-deprived adults together and the result is always FUN! I loved that, not just because of the laughter, but because it made me feel at home. Being that I have only been at my “new church” for a little over six months, we are still building memories together. I am grateful for the memory of last night…a night that really made me feel part of a community, like I belonged not just because I was the pastor, but because I was family. That is a great feeling!

We did do some specifically God-focused activities. Since it was MLK Jr. weekend, I used the occasion to talk with them about how God wants us to treat others (and how God wants us to love Him first). My big thing with them, recently, is the whole idea of “turning the other cheek”. Teenage years seem to be all about retaliation. Someone says something rude to you…you say something back…then it escalates. My favorite thing (note the sarcasm here) is when they do something bad and I call one of them out by saying, “So-and-so, enough!” (“enough” is my favorite form of rebuke). A teenager will not just stop the behavior. They have to tell me what someone did to cause their behavior. For instance, when they are rude to each other and I say, “Watch your attitude” (I am the attitude Nazi, it’s true)…they have to say, “But she…”, “But he…” No one is responsible for his/her own actions or responses; it is always someone else’s response that is to blame. Someone “made me” say or do what I did (if you want to see me go off into a “pastoral moment”, that is the best thing to say…just a note to any teenagers—or even some adults—who may be reading). I shouldn’t be surprised by this—it is as old as the Garden of Eden: “The woman You put with me, she made me do it”, says Adam…somehow indicting both God and the woman in the same sentence. The woman, or course, blames the snake. No one takes responsibility for their own actions. Teenagers display this human characteristic without shame. Adults do the same thing, but we are sneakier about it. I do it, too, unfortunately. I try to justify my actions or feelings before God by blaming it on what someone else did or said. I wonder if God gets as annoyed with me as I do with the kids when they try to pull that stuff. That really frustrates me. I don’t want to hear a big litany of what caused the behavior; I just want them to stop…and, when appropriate, apologize to the person they wronged. That’s probably true of God, too. Maybe he says, “Really, I just want you to repent and stop doing, to make amends, to forgive…I don’t need to hear all the reasons why you did it in the first place…just cut it out.”. I wonder if God has a cosmic “Enough!” that He shouts at us, as we make excuses for our ungodly behavior.

The interesting thing to me last night, as we talked about the Sermon on the Mount and some of the really radical things Jesus talked about, is how totally counter-cultural Jesus is. The kids get that. With that whole “turn the other cheek” thing, one of the teens said, “But why would you do that?” It doesn’t make sense to our human logic. We think we should fight back, protect ourselves, defend our own cause. With God, He says, “Treat the world with love that they don’t deserve, and I will be with you”. God is telling us, “Ultimately, I’ve ‘got your back’, so just do what I say, forget yourself, and make my Name known wherever you go, in whatever you do”.

I remember watching the movie “Gandhi” (won the Academy award in the 80s, stars Ben Kingsley). There is one scene that is permanently stuck in my mind. Gandhi and a white, British clergyman are walking together down the street in South Africa (at a time where it was illegal…or at least, very looked down upon by the masses) for a white person to walk down the street with anyone who was not, also, white. As they are walking, they see a bunch of ruffians (isn’t that a great word!?) up ahead. The pastor says to Gandhi, “Should we walk a different way?” (he has a very justifiable fear that they will get beaten up, if they continue on their current trajectory). Gandhi’s answer is to start talking about Jesus. He says, “You know when Jesus says in the Gospels to ‘turn the other cheek’, do you think he meant that literally or figuratively?” In true pastor fashion, the clergyman enters into a diatribe about the symbolic nature of what Jesus meant. Gandhi interrupts him by saying, “I think Jesus meant it literally. I think he meant that if you continually offer your cheek to one who would hit you, that it is the truest way to change men’s hearts”. He meant that, if you constantly refuse to repay evil with evil, eventually the heart of the evil-doer would be changed by your choice to love instead of hate. Some may call that kind of thinking “naïve”. But it made a difference in Gandhi’s world. It made a difference in Martin Luther King Jr.’s world. It makes a difference in the world of all who look at Jesus, dying on a cross for our sins, and decide to order their whole lives around Him.

It is naïve to think that human hearts can be completely changed overnight or that, by choosing the way of Jesus, we will escape the battle unscathed. This Way is a costly way…and we bear the cost ourselves—a cost we don’t deserve, didn’t earn, and is not “fair”. That is the Way of Jesus. That is the way of the Kingdom. It is not the way of the world. That is what it makes the world stop and take notice when we act differently. If we are faithful and true enough to the Way of Jesus, human hearts can and will be changed…all by turning the other cheek.

New hearts are a possibility, says God. I pray for all of us that our hearts would become more flesh and less stone with each passing day.

Ezekiel 11:19-20
“I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God.”