Hi's and Low's

When I was a youth director, one of my favorite things to do with the kids I worked with was Hi's and Low's.  We'd share something good that had happened and something not so good.  Someone told me once that I should reconsider using this format every week because it assumed something negative had to happen to everyone and that this lent to kids feeling like they had to "come up with" a negative experience.  I considered it, then decided to ask the kids what they thought.  Their response, in a nutshell, was this, "we're in Junior High and High School, we don't need to 'come up with' anything." I continued to do Hi's and Low's every time we gathered and listened in as the realness of life poured out of the kids mouths.  It was a holy time, perhaps one of the things I miss most about that work.

I experienced some Hi's and Low's this past week.  I spent the past seven days in my favorite place, Montana.  A bunch camp counselors who worked together in the early days of the 21st century gathered back at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp for a reunion.  I also had a chance to spend some time at my friends cabin on Lake Five, one of my all time favorite places on the globe.  My Hi is that I was reunited with the rare, beautiful, stunning, delightful, and impressive people who I call friends and was also able to see my fabulous brother and his amazing family.  I found myself in a state of blissed-out-ness so frequently that I was actually brought to tears on a couple of occasions.  My Low was that while in this blissed out state of giddy reunionitis, I was also keenly aware of the distance traveled in the past ten years and the changes wrought with such passing of time.  This is not to say this "low" is in any way me saying I am not happy now, or that I'm not pleased with where I stand today.  Instead it was a intense shock to see how quickly ones life can be altered and that in the shifting and moving there is also a need for some real, true, and difficult grieving.

I am not who I once was, a fairly naive and almost annoyingly optimistic goof-ball.  I am still mildly naive, but mostly because I now choose to be.  I am no longer annoyingly optimistic, though not fully pessimistic I consider myself now to be a reformed optimist.  I am still a goof-ball but on the rare occasions I am well rested enough for that side of me to reveal herself she feels slightly awkward and a bit more self conscious. 

I don't have to look hard these days to discover hi's, nor do I have to dig trenches to unearth a low but acknowledging both still feels as right and good as it did when I was in a room full of pubescent teenagers.  Until later...