lovely...

Dave tried to kill my brother.

Ok well the real story is this. The youth group usually has an all-night shindig at the church on New Year's Eve. But, they decided that this year, they would forego that in favor of driving out to PA to go to an indoor waterpark (leave Monday, come back Tuesday). So they did. And they made it back to West Milford without a problem. Adam, the youth pastor, had just finished patting himself on the back that nothing went wrong. And then he turns around to see blood all over my brother's hands and head.

Apparently, Dave has bad taste in music, and tries to share the wealth with others. My brother made a comment because the same racket had been playing for the past half hour. Dave flicks my brother in the ear. Big deal. My brother tosses the discarded wristband from the water park, and it hit Dave in the face. For some reason, that justified hitting my brother in the back of the head with a shot glass, opening up a gash in his head that got blood all over both his hands, a Snapple bottle and Stephanie.

Dan: the first thing i thought was daves life is gonna end in 30 seconds, and the second thing i thought was drop anything that might be a weapon so i dont go to jail and the third thing was my head is bleeding, maybe i should go inside

So anyway, it got me thinking about that sermon that keeps popping up a lot lately in my life: the one on meekness. Adam gave a sermon once where he defined meekness. People think that meekness means being weak... I guess just because of the similarity in the way it sounds. Merriam Webster says meekness is "enduring injury with patience and without resentment." In Adam's sermon, he took it a step farther to say that meekness is power under control. You could totally beat someone up for something, but you choose not to. Or even just, you have the power to resent someone, but choose not to. Anyway, that ties into the stuff with Barb about sutemi. Being meek means you have to sacrifice something. You have to let go of something inside you in order for meekness to happen, like in sutemi.

The fact that these things keep popping up over the past few weeks says something to me. It says that maybe I have things I need to let go of. Maybe there's something inside of me, that I'm holding onto with all the strength I can muster, because letting go means falling through the air into nothing, like in a stime. Maybe there's something inside me that doesn't know that falling in a stime is really flying in disguise.

Anyway... coming from a big sister, I don't care about meekness. If Dave tries a stunt like that while I'm around I want him to regret it.