Hilldale Hezbullah

I wasn’t planning on going to rec night tonight. This evening I was on my way home after a very long day at work. I had just finished my 40th hour of the work week and was ready to go home, get a shower, and turn on my new season collection of House. But then I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize.

I don’t like answering my phone and I really don’t like surprises because for some reason I feel like someone is going to call and ask me to do something I don’t want to do, and I feel so bad when I tell them no. I answered it anyways and on the other end I heard this googly voice say, “Hey Matt!” It was my buddy Sam, who I haven’t seen since I left Hopewell. He wanted to go to rec night and see some of the refugees, but for some reason his mom wouldn’t let him go alone. I was so tired and exhausted from the everyday stresses of working at a thrift store. You know – picking stuff up, moving stuff, setting stuff down, etc. So I told Sam I wasn’t really planning on going.

But of course I knew that this was a valuable chance to hang out with an old friend while I hung out with the people of Hilldale. And I have to say I have always been fond of Sam and tonight I realized exactly why I like him so much – because he doesn’t try to be cool. I’ve noticed that most people (me included) have this need to always be cool. In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller talks about how for some reason society makes it look like being cool is the most important thing for all of us. Seriously, because we like to associate with certain people (athletes, celebrities, rock stars) because they are cool. Most of the time we don’t even know these people but we think they are awesome. It doesn’t really matter what kind of person they are or what they actually believe or anything.

From being around Sam, it seems like he never needs to be cool. He never needs to impress people and I think that is awesome, probably because I’m just the opposite. You see, Sam is a nerd and proud of it. He has a belt buckle that looks exactly like a Nintendo controller. He can talk to you about videogames for two hours and all you have to do is sit there and say “yeah” and “uh huh”. He used to impersonate Jigglypuff, but we won’t go there.

I don’t know if he just gave up on being cool, but he doesn’t try. And I respect that about Sam. He is who he is and there are not a lot of people I know like that.

So anyways I gave in and I decided to go to rec night. I expected to go there and shoot some basketball a little bit and just kind of hang out. But I got there and after about half an hour I found myself into a run-and-gun, all-offense-no-defense game of basketball that is going to have me sore in the morning. Josh and Lee were captains and I ended up on Lee’s team. We were terrible, and we got absolutely throttled. I figured having Lee on the team would be a weakness, but he actually was our leading scorer. He was unconscious from the three point line.

Speaking of Lee, he is quite a character too. When I first went to Hilldale, he was one of the first people I met and also one of the friendliest. He treated me almost like a brother from the very first day. Andy always talks about how, whenever Lee does anything, he goes all out. And he does. I have an image in my mind from last week’s camp of the worship services: All the kids up front standing close to the stage where the band was playing and Lee standing right in the middle with his hands raised up and his head bowed. Lee is a worshipper, and I love that. While I’m standing in the back with my arms crossed, trying to decided whether or not a like the band, or if the hand-raisers are really sincere; Lee is caught up worshipping Jesus in the Spirit.

Lee, however, is not much of a team captain. He is one of those guys who picks his friends rather than the good players. So instead of getting anybody good, he got guys like me. And so while they were throwing alley-oops and no-look passes, we were running around doing whatever we could to just score a basket or two.

Along with basketball, we got a chance to see some sweet skateboarding action from Jeff (a.k.a. Tony Hawk) and Justin (a.k.a. Bob Burnquist). Talking baseball with your friends while sipping on a Mountain Dew and watching these guys rip up the parking lot with their boards is a blessing in disguise.

After that I realized that ping-pong is awesome. Andy and I started imagining what we would call the Hilldale basketball team.

The Hilldale Humps

The Hilldale Hoopla

The Hilldale Haterz

The (ever-controversial) Hilldale Homophobes

We finally decided on…
The Hilldale Hezbullah

I thoroughly enjoyed rec night tonight. I’m so glad Sam called me and asked me to go because I know I was just going to go home and play X-box by myself.

I am becoming a person who strongly believes in community. I believe in loving people. I mean really loving people. Not the “put your church smile on” type of love, but the sacrificial, unconditional, “you are more important that I am” type of love. On any given moment tonight you could walk around and see community. You could start off in the gym where the guys were all playing basketball. Everybody had a great attitude too: nobody was fighting or arguing, and everyone got to play. It’s like, though we were playing basketball, there was an understanding that there was something more than winning a meaningless basketball game.

Walk outside the gym and you see people sitting over by the snack machines talking and watching arena football. Some guys are playing pool, air hockey, and ping-pong. Some other kids are running around getting a hide-and-seek game going.

Walk outside of the building and you will see the skateboarders (Tony and Bob) showing off their awesome tricks to some nearby onlookers. People are just standing around, talking – just hanging out. These people are there pretty much because it’s fun to be there in community. And if that means we are playing basketball or playing ping-pong or watching arena football or watching two guys skate, then it’s great. Because the reason we do those things is so we can be around people.

I watched the movie Orange County the other day. I used to love that movie but when I watched it recently I didn’t think it was quite as good. I guess because it was a little too “MTV” for me. Still, it’s a good movie that taught me something about life. It’s about this high school senior who wants to be a writer and go to Stanford; but because everybody in his life is crazy in one way or another, every chance he gets at going to Stanford gets messed up. His high school counselor mails in the wrong transcript, his brother burns a Stanford building down, and his girlfriend accidentally gets the dean of admissions high. In the end he learns that he doesn’t have to go to Stanford to be a writer. He has plenty of inspiration from the interesting characters that are in his hometown.

I like to think of my world that way, especially the people. I have some really cool and interesting people in my life. My family is interesting. My friends are interesting. I may not seem interesting on the surface but I can be if I really try. I’m starting to look at life in a way that I can be inspired, entertained and moved by the people, the “characters”, in my world. People like Sam and Lee. If you look hard enough then you can really find a lot of heart and inspiration in people, in their stories.

I think about my mom and about how she had to deal with her own father’s suicide when she was a teenager. My mom is the nicest, most loving and giving person I know – and I’m not just saying that because she is my mom.

I think about Andy who had to go through a really, really bad situation when he lost his job at Hopewell. Things like that can be very damaging to your faith, but I’ve been able to see Andy move on to bigger and better things. Now I’m convinced that Andy is working on building a youth ministry that I believe in and want to be a part of, mainly because I know God is using Andy to love teenagers.

I think about my friends Jeremy and Keith who have been some of my best friends since middle school. We can go months without talking, decide to get together for bowling one day, and it’s like we never missed a step. Lately we have been getting together on weekends to do nothing other than hang out, eat pizza, and play Madden football. And I love it.

I think about how a year ago my sister and I probably could not have been farther apart; when I felt like all I could do was pray for her. The other day, when we were on our trip everybody was telling us how they couldn’t believe how close we are now and how we said such nice things about each other. I couldn’t do anything but look at the ground because I was trying (and failing) not to burst into tears. It’s true, she is my best friend, and perhaps my biggest testament to the fact that God answers prayer.

Life is an amazing story and God is just now showing me that everything, whether good or bad, is important because it points to the overall story of God. We all have conflict in our lives, characters, a setting, etc. We are living out the story of God. Pierce Pettis has a line in a song that says “Everything matters if anything matters at all.” Amen to that. Now, instead of looking at my life as a hopeless, tragic soup of random meaningless events; I am looking at my life as story full of hope and wonder. I am throwing out skepticism, pessimism, and bitterness. I am taking up faith, hope, and love. And it makes all the difference, it really does.