Hello reader friends! A quick story…
When I was eighteen years old, I was invited to be part of the leadership team for an inter-school retreat.
I had gone on the retreat before as a regular attendee, so being asked to be a Leader was a great honor.
Customarily, the student retreat leaders from both schools would meet with the adult retreat leaders at a house by the lake a couple weekends before, to plan the content of the retreat.
Me and a few others guys arrived, all of us high school seniors. I hadn’t been close with any of them, prior to that day.
But, we’d all brought beer.
After the adults went to sleep, we partied.
Eventually, the retreat organizer woke at 5 am and found us still in the living room, drunkenly laughing it up.
We got in serious trouble.
He was so angry I thought he might have a heart attack. Never before had retreat leaders gotten drunk at the retreat planning weekend, he said.
We were all banished upstairs to think on what we’d done while the adults gathered to discuss what they would do with us. They talked of cancelling the retreat entirely.
For the next hour, us doomed man-children debated our options. We debated our response to the grownups.
It was a crisis. Some of us freaked out, some of us stayed calm, some of us went into frantic overdrive to figure out what to say. None of of us wanted to be kicked off the leadership team, but the adults were angry enough to do it.
And this is the point of my story: during that crisis, I got to know my co-leaders at their most desperate. At a time when instinct normally takes over.
And each person was their real selves during the crisis.
That’s what I learned that day. I saw how each of my co-leaders behaved during the most difficult time we had faced since coming together.
Maybe you’ve seen peoples’ real selves since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Hopefully, you’re taking care of yourself and taking good care of everyone around you.
Hopefully, you aren’t quarantined with an axe murderer right now…
STAY SAFE! HOPE YOU’RE ENJOYING THE SIX ASSASSINS SERIES…
(We ended up having the retreat and it was great.)
