Running on 3 Hours Sleep

is why I'm getting too old for these youth retreats. I just don't recover as fast anymore.

Every year the dynamic of the confirmation group is different, and this year, they are good kids, but the are SO SQUIRRELY. And they don't know how to whisper. We discovered that at the January retreat when the girls were talking in cafeteria voices well into the night, and when we asked them to quiet down and start whispering (we even modeled the decibel level for them), they only took things down to a dull roar. It was only after threatening to split them up that they finally calmed down.

So this time Breen and I slept in the hallway/stairwell outside the fellowship hall. Close enough to be available if they needed anything and to hear if they got into trouble, but putting a concrete wall and a thick wooden door between their noise and our ears. Even so, after an hour I got up, opened the door and said "Ladies, just because you don't have to be uber quiet doesn't mean you need to yell all night long." That got them to quiet down until I got back into my sleeping bag. :)

Turns out our location was strategically well-chosen, because the boys got it in their head to pull a sneak attack on the girls to scare them. Patrick was sleeping in the hallway, blocking their most direct path, and rather than chance waking him, they went down the back stairwell, cut across the basement, and were going to come up the stairwell we were in - thinking they were bypassing the pesky adults that might foil their plan.

But they didn't know we were in the main stairwell. I was sleeping closest to the stairs and suddenly at 2 am I heard voices in the basement and saw flashlights and shadowy figures at the bottom of the stairs. So I shouted "What are you guys doing? GO TO BED!"

Which they did, and that was all we heard from them. But then half an hour later, the girls are standing in the doorway, "Pastor C., there's a strange car in the parking lot."

Which is a frequent occurance at our church. It's really weird, but people pull into our parking lot all the time, at all hours of the day or night - they'll eat lunch, swap vehicles, race remote control cars, take a nap, sit and talk, make out - we're out in the middle of nowhere and I've never known a parking lot to be as hopping as ours.

But I digress. I figured it was just a couple looking for a place to park, but got up to check it out. The girls had turned the lights on and were freaking out because they thought someone was walking around outside - they were seeing their own reflections in the window! So we turned out the lights and went to look - the car was gone.

But they were spooked, and now there was loud thunder and bright lightening to boot. So I spent a while trying to talk them down, reassuring them all the doors were locked, Pastor Patrick was in the entryway, Pastor Breen and I were next door in the hallway, and it was probably just somebody who needed a break from driving in the rain, or a young couple looking for moochas smoochas - that thought got them laughing, which calmed them down. I offered to sing - collective roll of the eyes. I offered to preach them to sleep (we'd just talked about Paul and Eutychus earlier in the evening) - no to that too. But that elicited a few more laughs, relaxed their fears a bit more. I told them to come get me if the car came back, then finally went to bed.

Today was alright - I can usually push through the next day on little sleep - it's the day after that that's the worst. Tomorrow morning is gonna be painful. And we're due to have a lot of visitors in worship thanks to a family reunion. Uff da!