This week I am spending my mornings running music at my church’s Vacation Bible School program, and while I am already about to pass out from exhaustion, I’m having a great time. There is something supremely awesome about watching your kids run around the same building you used to frequent as a kid yourself, as they discover the same shortcuts and secrets that you discovered all of those years ago. There are so many stories that come rushing back to me as I watch my children explore and play. For instance, there was the time I accidentally learned how to drywall.
When I was a young teenager, or possibly tweenager, one of my favorite things to do was to run as fast as I could at a wall, generally the brick kind on the outside of my school, and then stop myself with my feet on the wall, essentially attempting to run up the building. I would push myself off the wall with my feet and spin back through the air, landing back on those feet and pointed in the other direction, at which point I would just keep on running. I guess I had a lot more energy than I do now. It was like junior parkour, and I did it all the time.
Of course, being a youngish person with a brain that was flooded with chemicals that make good decisions impossible, this eventually came back to haunt me. One day, as I was running at top speed from the chapel towards the main office of the church, nevermind the fact that running at top speed was generally discouraged in the church, I decided that this would be an excellent time to use my amazing skills to round the corner, and so as I flew down the hallway at mach 10 I launched myself into the air, legs extended in a ninja pose, and drove myself straight through the drywall and into the ministries office. Well, the foot and leg part of me anyway. The rest of me was still in the hallway, wondering how many years of purgatory this was going to add on to my already lengthy sentence.
As I sheepishly confessed to the pastor and the custodian, I was wondering how much this was going to cost me, just how dead my mother was going to make me, and how on Earth I was going to get out of this much trouble. And it turned out to be relatively simple. They were not too angry with me, and as long as I fixed the wall, there would be no further punishment. I tried to explain to them that I had no idea how to fix a wall, and that they might as well ask me to assemble a freight train, but the matter was settled. One Saturday morning I arrived at the church where I was met by the custodian and a bucket of drywall. We spent two hours that day, fixing the wall. It actually was kind of fun.
The wall is still there, and as I see my kids run past it at top speed, I wonder how many people know or remember that I built it. Or maybe I didn’t. Perhaps it has been rebuilt several times. I have no idea how many other kids have karate kicked their way through it over the past couple of decades. But my guess is not too many. No more than a few dozen.