Meetings are a drag . . .

I don't care what the meeting's for, I don't want to be there. It could be a meeting to make sure that I get a free ice cream cone everyday for the rest of my life, and I still wouldn't want to be there.

Meetings happen when a group of people get together who all have differing opinions - which invariably means that at least one person in the group will think I'm an idiot. So my solution is to sit quietly and pretend I don't exist. I like to daydream about things - and not just any old thing, I have very specific meeting daydreams.

The first one is great scenes from movies. 99% of the time, it'll be the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones is holding the rocket launcher on the Nazis as they round the bend in the canyon holding the ark and Indy yells, "I'm gonna blow it up Rene!"

I've had that daydream since sitting through boring high school classes, and it always makes me immediately yearn to run home and watch the movie. Yet, by the time I get home, the yearning has faded, and I end up watching cartoons.

The other daydream, and the one that currently holds realm in most of my meetings, is remembering great pro wrestling matches that I've seen. Most often, it's the Bret Hart - Steve Austin match from Wrestlmania 13, a true mat classic.

Otherwise it'll be just about anything Ric Flair's been in.

And yet, no matter how quiet and invisible I attempt to be, someone always says, "Jason, you've been so quiet. What do you think?" And then I open my big, dumb gob, and end up regretting it for the rest of my life.

I've got to figure out a way to get out of more meetings . . .

Making your own fun . . .

I've spent a lot of time on the road over the last five years cramped up with a lot of other people. Besides just speaking, and stand-up, I performed on the Northwestern College summer drama ministry team for two summers, driving around the country in a 15 passenger van for up to 8 or 10 hours a day. I've driven hours upon hours with the Sioux Falls crew, and spent many a night on an air mattress-crowded floor with seven or eight other people. After a while, monotony of travel, lack of sleep, and close quarters on bad beds can make you go a little nutty and get a little tense. I've always taken it upon myself on trips to loosen things up a bit. My main choice of action is the practical joke or dare. So I figured I'd take a moment or two and share some of my favorites from over the last several years - at least the ones that are fit to print.

The Dare / Exploding Cigarette
On one of the drama ministry tours, right in the middle of an extremely long van ride, our group stopped to eat at a McDonald's in the middle of Podunk, Nowhere. I was eating at a table with my wife Andrea, and a good friend Tonya (now Tonya Folkerts).

Dares are always really big with me on gruelling trips. I like to challenge people to crazy things for either small amounts of money, or I'll guarantee them I'll do something even crazier than the challenge I pose. I never plan on winning the bets. Part of the fun is finding a challenge that's crazy, but just easy enough for the participant to accept. Then, not only do they do something crazy, but they get to watch me do something a little nutty too. It can liven the whole group up.

So we're sitting there, and we look out the window, and there are these two teenage girls who can't be more than 14 apiece, sitting outside at a table, smoking cigarettes. After a lengthy conversation over hamburgers about how unappealing these two girls are, I dare Tonya to go outside and bum a cigarette from them. I tell her I'll give her two bucks.

Tonya quickly agrees, but I tell her that's not all. There's a large, round (about a foot in diameter) rubber adverstisment on our table (sticky on one side, with a picture on the other) advertising the new McDonald's milkshake. I tell Tonya she has to peel the ad off the table and wear it on her stomach. She does. We watch. The girls give her a wide-eyed surprised look. And Tonya gets a cigarette.

So now we're in the van, I give Tonya her two bucks, and she says, "Well, I guess I'll throw it away, I don't smoke." That's when the great idea hits. Someone has brought along on the trip these things called "Cigarette Loads". They're basically these little white firecrackers you can hide in the end of cigarettes to make them explode after the person's lit them and puffed. We have several smokers on the trip, and we've been waiting for an opportunity to slip them one, but we can never get our hands on their cigarettes.

So Tonya loads it up, walks over to a smoker on our team named Solomon, explains the teenage girl dare, tells him it was funny but she doesn't smoke, and offers him the cigarette. He kindly accepts and we watch as he walks off a bit from the van and lights up.

Now, these loads are pretty small, so we're not expecting much - maybe a small *pop*. Well, about five seconds into the smoke - BANG - like a black cat going off. Sol drops the cigarette and just backs up like he's been shot. We were laughing so hard from the van and feeling so content at such a string of great jokes.

Frozen Toilet
Another drama ministry trip - we're in Traverse City Michigan over a spring break. The drama team is rehearsing a play on the main stage, and I'm sitting in the empty auditorium watching because I'm not on the trip for drama, just stand-up. So I'm sitting there, bored out of my mind, and sitting next to me is the theater director's son, Joseph.

I lean over to Joseph and ask him if he wants in on something good. He does. I lead him back to our two suites that we're staying in (the guys in one, the girls in the other) and we walk out to the patios. Luckily, we find the girls' patio door open, so we let ourselves in. I tell Joseph to find a bucket of some kind, and he comes back from the kitchen with a big plastic bowl. Michigan is in the middle of this huge snow storm, so we make trips back and forth outside collecting snow - which we then kindly deposit in the girls' toilet until it finally tops off. We pack it down hard, put the bowl back, let ourselves back out the patio door, and head back to the auditorium.

Later in the afternoon when we're all back in our rooms watching TV, we hear a scream from the girls' side. We all rush over and find one of the girls, Crystal, standing in the kitchen in a very panicked state. "What's wrong?" everyone asks. Crystal tells us that when she sat down on the toilet a second ago, something "bit me!"

Well, it was just the snow (now ice) giving her a little frost nip, and the greatest part was, that even though Joseph and I were the only two people on the tour who could have slipped away from the rest of the group, the girls are blaming the other guys in the group. Perfect.

Underwear Ninjas
I ran out of underwear during the middle of the week three years ago at the SERVE project in Sioux Falls, SD. I had come to SERVE in the middle of a summer drama tour, and hadn't had time to do laundry. It was Thursday, we were all tired as all get out, and I decided that instead of tracking down a laundry machine, I'd just buy more underwear.

We head to Walmart, and I grab a pack of boxer briefs. (Which was pretty fun in itself because I'd forgotten what my size is, so Mark Elgersma actually checked the pair I was wearing, while I was wearing it, in the middle of Walmart.)

We get back to the van, me and Mark in the back seat, and Troy Kooima and Dawn Ryswyk in the front seats. Now, I've figured out this little trick that only works with boxer briefs. If you put your head through the waist and one leg so that you're wearing it like a turtle neck with the leg pulled up over your nose, and then take the other leg and bring it down over the top of your head leaving only your eyes open - you look like a ninja.

We (Mark and I) decide we all need to be underwear ninjas, so we hand a pair around to everyone. Dawn quickly removes hers though after Mark and I ponder about whether or not it was the pair I tried on in the store.

Now we're all driving along on our merry way, making up great underwear ninja names for ourselves (Skid-Mark, Blue Flame) when we pull up to a stop light and Dawn points out to Troy (who's driving) that there's a cop on our left.

Troy freaks, because he's a guy who never wears a seatbelt, so he goes, "Oh, crap!" and starts struggling to get his belt on before the cop looks over. Right when Troy snaps it into place, the cop looks, the light turns green, and we take off. Troy lets out a big "Whew!" And Dawn says, "Yeah, I'm really sure he was noticing your seatbelt when you and two other guys in the car ARE WEARING UNDERWEAR ON YOUR HEAD!"

He didn't pull us over, so it must not have been the wierdest thing he'd ever seen.

Till next time,

Jason

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points is Sioux Falls

So I attended and spoke for the Youth Unlimited Summit Conference at Camp Geneva in Michigan this past weekend. It's a conference set up for all the different groups around the world that will be hosting SERVE projects for the coming year. I'm the speaker for the Sioux Falls SERVE site, and last year I had the crew pick me up in Newton, IA on their way out to Holland, MI.

This year, though, I drove the extra five hours of the trip up to Sioux Falls in order to be able to spend an extra day when we got back for a going away party for good friend Dustin Vander Haar as he's headed for the Netherlands tomorrow for four months.

It was a fantastic trip. Too tough to go into detail on everything, so I'm just going to give some highlights of the trip. As I've said before, and I'll say again, the Sioux Falls crew is by far the greatest group of people I've ever had the chance to minstry with. It's non stop fun and laughs the whole time.

"In the bathroom." That was answer you would recieve 99% of the time if you asked the question, "Hey, where's Dustin?" Dustin had a severe cold / stomach flu, so he spent most of time expelling things from his body in the cabin bathroom. It got so bad that Danny Fergen and I ran into town to get him some extra soft toilet paper, extra strength Immodium, and moist towelettes. You can probably imagine how manly we felt walking through the checkout line with those items together. The highlight came on Sunday though, when after finally feeling better, Dustin walked into the bathroom while I was in there, and loudly asked, "Whew! Did you do that?" Well, unbeknownst to Dustin, there was a guy in the stall next to me who quietly answered back, "That was me . . ." We all thought Dustin had a lot of nerve to take offense to someone else after the weekend he'd just gone through.

Roommates So the Youth Unlimited people always mix our crew in with strangers in the cabins. This is not always a good idea due to the fact that we tend to sleep very little, and make a lot of noise at night. Last year, at about 2:30 AM Dan Tenapel and Mark Elgersma came back to the cabin after defeating some Canadians at ping pong and did a victory dance or two in their underwear. This year, Mark laid under / next to my bed in the pitch dark, in his underwear for an unbelievably long time just to try and scare me when I came back from the chapel on Saturday night. After waiting five or ten minutes after I'd laid down, he reached up and smacked me. Unfortunately, rather than being scared, I thought Dustin had fallen out of the bunk above me since he was so sick. Add on top of that the fact that several of us snore, talk in our sleep, or toss and turn, Mark has an interesting nude shower dance, and Dustin stunk up the bathroom for the whole weekend, and you can get a pretty good clue as to who you shouldn't room with if you come to Summit.

"If you're too tired to drive . . . " Another phrase often heard this weekend. You see, when you get all of us together in one van, the driver often feels left out since they have to concentrate on something other than the uproarious laughter coming from the back. In an effort to be included, the various drivers often turn part way around to catch some of the conversations. This often leads to some good back and forth swerving on the road, at which point someone will invariably look up and offer, "If you're too tired to drive, I can take over!"

Dustin has a stinking hammock in his room! I got to spend a good chunk of Monday at Dustin's house before his going away party. And to put it simply, his house rocks my face off. For starters, he's accomplished a childhood dream of mine that my father assured me was impossible - he has a hammock hanging over his bed in his room. I laid in it. We also watched a classic Halloween episode of Macgyver where Mac had to team up with his arch enemy Murdoch on Dustin's fam's 60 inch tv. That was after we played pool on his pool table next to the wet bar / basement kitchen, but before we ate homemade banana bread from his mom . . .

Riding buddies. Mark and I made the last two and a half hours of the trip alone since we picked up his car along the way in Albert Lea. It was late, we were cranky and tired, and we'd been in the van for almost ten hours already. So after about an hour in the car together, Mark decided to count the little white posts that mark every tenth of a mile! And I decided to retaliate by making a really neat little annoying noise with my lips. We quickly made the decision it was time to switch up driving partners for a bit, and since we were way ahead of the van, we pulled over. I got out of the car, grabbed my phone, called the van, and said, "Pull over! We're switching now!" We then found out that the van had caught up to us, passed the exit and were a mile down the road when we called them. Mark and I looked at each other, and decided we were stuck, so we got back in and made it the rest of the way home without killing each other. And you know what? I'm pretty sure it made our friendship stronger. What would have happened if we'd split at the exit? Would we have talked again? Would we have broken up for good? Who would have taken custody of the kids?

Poker game. Me, Dustin, Mark, Jason Baartman, Danny Fergen, Luke Vander Leest, David Fergen, and Troy Kooima all around one table to play cards, laugh and give Dustin a sending off. Then a SERVE conversation with Dustin, Mark and Troy that started at 1 AM and lasted till 3. My sides literally hurt from laughing so hard at the end.

And then there are the things that if I went into them now, not only would this post end up twenty pages long, but I may get in trouble with the law:

Grandma Dawn
Tooth nerves
Underwear running
Mouse hunts
"Two weeks at camp till the bleeding stopped"

And oh yeah, I spoke on Sunday morning too. All in all, I'm charged and ready for a great year with these guys. I speak with David, Danny, Mark and Baartman in February, Troy and Dawn in March, Danny and Mark in April, and the whole crew in June and July. I'm excited. Every trip up there I'm reminded in a big way why I got I'm in ministry. God is huge, friends are fantastic, and big things happen with them.

Till next time,
Jason

Happy New Year

I usually get VERY nervous before I speak. Usually it's only bad for a few hours before I go on, but if the speaking engagement is big or important, I can get pretty nervous for up to several days before hand. Fortunately, I seem to have found a cure.

I was asked to give the Christmas morning message here at the 2nd Reformed Church, and I initially got very nervous. I would be up in front of the whole congregation (the home crowd is always more nerve wracking) and I knew that I'd have family there. So the nerves started up about a week and a half before I even had to speak.

I had the severe stomach butterflies, lack of sleep, and an inability to think about anything other than the message so early, that I feared this Christmas holiday would be marred by my agreement to speak.

Then I got the flu.

Not just any flu - but the real bad, horribly nauseous, I fainted on the way to the bathroom, couldn't eat, bad headache, really tired, in the bathroom every fifteen minutes for five days kind of flu. And thankfully, during the whole time that I was either sitting on (or hunched over) the toilet, I wasn't nervous in the least. I lost five pounds, got some loopy pills from the Doctor, and took many naps on the cool bathroom linoleum, but I wasn't nervous one bit.

I also didn't put much time in on the sermon either. In fact, most of it was written between the hours of 5 and 9 AM while I laid on the bathroom floor on Friday the 23rd. Saturday the 24th, I started to feel a little better, and I was probably 75% on Sunday morning when I actually had to give the message. And it went really well. Brother-in-law Kyle played a shepherd for me, and I got a lot of really great comments from the congregation. So I don't have to worry about hanging my head as I walk the hallowed halls of 2nd Reformed.

Then on Christmas day, Andrea came down with the same thing and it lasted three days for her.

Yet, despite the illness, Andrea and I had a great Christmas / New Year. We saw all the family. Got great loot. And my brother Jon and his wife Amy gave us our first nephew on December 29th. They were very gracious when we showed up to wait in the hospital all day for the baby to be born, and they even let us come into the room to see him get his first bottle and blood test. His name is Noah Warren Taylor, he's extremely cute, and we're excited to have a new family member!

We also hosted three different New Year's Eve celebrations this year. We started early on the 30th with good friends Mike and Susie Rottink - playing cards till three AM. Then on the 31st we added California friends Nathan and Dina Kinkaid with their beautiful babe Haley and my brother Chris unit 3 AM. And then on the first, Pella friends Jennie and her fiance Tracy joined us for 90's Trivial Pursuit and Apples to Apples until 4 AM. We actually went through every single card in the Apples game - which is no small feat if you know how the game is played.

All in all, it was one of the best holidays in memories regardless of the flu, and as you can guess, Andrea and I are having a little trouble getting back on a "normal" sleeping schedule after three late nights.

I'm very excited for an upcoming trip to Michigan at the end of next week with the Sioux Falls crew. We're attending a SERVE team retreat for all the sights around the country and I have to give a commissioning message. I'll hopefully have an update on that event soon.

Till next time,
Jason