Thoughts from beneath the bed of nails
Mood:  accident prone
Topic: MyWords::RE::RandomStuff

Last week, TimothyPaulJones took part in a Team Impact event. Team Impact is a group of massive athletes---former professional football players, wrestlers, mixed martial arts champions, and the like---who mostly smash things in spectacular ways and then tell people about Jesus. TimothyPaulJones spent his formative years trying to avoid football players and other large athletes, primarily because he did not like the taste of gym socks and because the interior of a locker is an awfully cramped place.*

But these athletes are different---really.

In the first place, they don't make people eat gym socks or confine them to lockers ... not that we know of, anyway. In the second place---which should probably be in first place---they actually are smart guys.

Seriously.

Jeff Neal, for example, is a former professional football player who seems to have misplaced his neck somewhere in his shoulders. But he is also currently working on his second master's degree, and TimothyPaulJones is trying to convince him to pursue a PhD in the School of Leadership and Church Ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Anyhow, during the Team Impact crusade last week, TimothyPaulJones ended up on stage with these very large individuals. He felt pretty good about this at first, because there weren't any lockers on the stage and the only gym socks were the ones on people's feet. 

At this point, Jeff Neal placed a rack with more than one thousand nails on TimothyPaulJones' torso, while Guy Earle looked on. In most places, this sort of thing is widely considered to be a bad idea. 

Then the former football players piled concrete blocks on the rack of nails and got a sledge hammer. Spending the night in a locker was beginning to look very inviting at this point, if you want to know the truth.

At this point, Jeff Neal utilized the sledgehammer to smash the concrete blocks to bits. (Notice carefully the not-entirely-certain-that-this-was-the-best-idea look on the face of former Mr. Teenage Arkansas Trey Talley.)

There are times in life when the first thought that crosses one's mind is, "Hmmm, I am glad that I wore dark pants today, and I do wish that I would have stopped at the second Venti Caramel Macchiato instead of ordering a third one." There are also times when one simply thinks, "This is probably the stupidest thing I have ever allowed myself to be talked into."

Then, there are those moments when both of those thoughts occur at the same time.

The instant that the sledgehammer struck the rack of nails was one of those moments.

But, in the end, TimothyPaulJones survived. He is like a superhero that way, except that he does not possess any superpowers. This is probably why he plays role-playing games; he has many superpowers in those. TimothyPaulJones is now widely rumored to be hiding in a locker somewhere, rolling his twenty-sided dice. This makes him very happy. But he is glad to have been part of Team Impact too, if only to remind him of the importance of wearing dark pants.

 

 

* Yes, TimothyPaulJones was that kid---the one with the well-worn role-playing game instruction manual who randomly quoted obscure lines from fantasy and sci-fi movies but who couldn't keep track of where he was at any given moment ... well actually, to tell the truth, he's still pretty much like that.