less explodey

First, this:





Except the pedant in me says "mitosis only leads to two cell products; meiosis [and only meiosis in males at that] is what leads to four cells." But of course, meiotically-produced cells have only half the chromosomes...so I guess mitosis is probably more appropriate there.

****

Second, youth group made me feel better. Sometimes I need to get out and away from the laser-like intense focus of my work on campus.

The kids were reasonably well-behaved tonight (we've been having about 15). True, they're not PERFECT - there's a lot of giggling over in-jokes that were made at school, and faces being made at people across the table, but they were better than they were some weeks.

My lesson was on "happiness," or, a better term, contentment. I kind of based it on the Beatitudes and also on the verse out of Matthew about gaining your life by losing it (taking the tack of when you die to yourself, you open up more possibilities than you would have by being selfish and me-me-me all the time). I used a quotation from the Phillip Yancey book I'm reading right now (Hi, Tracey!) where he talks about how many of the famous people he had interviewed were flat miserable because they didn't have the chance to be involved with something "bigger than them," or by extension, they saw themselves as the center of the universe, and that's not a real fun place to be for very long.

(One of the kids didn't want to believe that rich people could be unhappy, but I think maybe I convinced him. Because I knew some very rich people in high school who were AWFULLY miserable. And my own family - though we had enough to get by comfortably, we weren't rich, not like the other kids at my school. But we were pretty happy.)

But what really made me feel better was the game time after the lesson.

The one thing that rehabilitates DST a little for me is that now it's not dark yet when we're done with the lesson, so we can take the kids out for a while to play games outside, instead of playing board games (which some like but some don't) or billiards (yes, we have a billiards table in the youth room. Alert the River City Citizens for Morality...)

The church is a couple blocks from the local middle school and after hours kids are welcome to run around in the schoolyard if they're supervised. So we took them over there.

So the kids went out, and some elected to toss a softball around, and some chose to play a variant of touch football (with fewer people and a tap on the shoulder counted as a "tackle").

And you know, after all the bad news I've heard - bad news close to me and bad news in the world at large - this week, it comforted me a lot to see a bunch of kids running around in a schoolyard throwing a football around, or playing catch. There's something so NORMAL about it - and right now, so many things have happened around me that don't seem normal, that don't seem right, that it's comforting to see something so ordinary and so normal.

I don't know if that really makes sense to anything but me but it did remind me that the sun comes up every morning, that the stuff that's getting to me right now will either go away or I will adjust to eventually, and that kids still enjoy running around and shouting and tossing footballs...