Was it only a building? Or was it so much more?
From the outside, it vaguely resembled the love child of a Battlestar Galactica spaceship and an abandoned swimming pool. But for those of us who were able to venture inside and navigate the seemingly endless and comically uneven ramp, our experience was truly out-of-this-world.
We danced. We sang. We studied. We worshiped. We played. We laughed. We cried. We even puked, particularly after the Spicy Death Nut challenge or when dining on durian from the Oriental Market.
Frisbees and dodgeballs were thrown. Footballs and garters were caught. No one ever caught the Dodgeballs I threw…except for the one time it ricocheted so hard off of a kid’s hip that someone caught it 25 feet away. Josh was OUT!!! And there was much rejoicing.
Kids did their first pull-ups. Boys salted their first slugs…and then salted several hundred more! But more importantly, kids heard the Gospel for the very first time and became “salt and light” in the midst of a dark world.
Ankles (usually mine) and lights were broken, but hearts were mended. We “made it rain” when playing basketball…and were also showered with mysterious debris we called “asbestos” every time we got a little carried away and hit the ceiling. (Don’t worry, it wasn’t really asbestos…we think).
And there was Princess Ball. And Heritage Baseball. The MOST ULTIMATE of Frisbee and the most epic of Vacation Bible Schools. And Nine Square. And Two Ball. And Human Hungry Hippos. And Hotpockets. And Exotic Fruits. And Jellybeans. Most of the food was well-past the expiration date, but hey, we’re all living on borrowed time here anyway! We figured the “nutrient-enriched” water we drank from the ancient pipes rendered us impervious to most strains of botulism. Besides, whatever was in the cupboard couldn’t have been riddled with any more bacteria than the assorted creatures that had probably died underneath the couches in the Sunday School room!
Hide-and-seek was LEGEN-(wait for it)-DARY, and we always expected to discover a homeless guy living in the darkest recesses of one of the 17 kitchens. New kids were convinced the moths in the boiler room were truly as big as eagles. And when the lights went out, the Legends grew even more absurd! Although we did have to make a rule that kids couldn’t hide in the freezer after we found Titus in there once…that’s not a great long-term place to hide and avoid dying, no matter what Walt Disney thought.
In the end, no one died…and more than that, we really LIVED. And we really LOVED.
And this quirky building became symbolic of unexpected providence…of boundless creativity…and of youthful vitality.
Time passed. And we grew up. “Adulting” loomed on the horizon, but if it’s possible to fight the inevitable shift to “Real Life” while simultaneously maturing, we did just that. Because the life we shared together was more Real than any mirage that “Real Life” could ever offer. And the “All-Nighters” turned into “Most-Nighters” and then “Half-Nighters” and then just “Nighters.” But regardless, we knew that “If we could just make it to Wednesday Night, everything was going to be ok.”
A bunch of stuff happened. A lot of it made me sad. Most everyone moved on eventually. And that’s ok…after all, “It was only a building.”
If my heart was merely an impersonal and metronomic 4-chambered pump, then maybe the experiences we shared inside those 4 walls were similarly unremarkable. But if you ever go downstairs, just know that the faux dance floor is paved with permanent pieces of my heart and those superficially nasty couches are indelibly embroidered with fragments of my soul. And no one who ever truly lived and loved there would ever say, “It was only a building.”
