Despised In Her Eyes

Back in 1981 I got to travel with my family to Observe the Feast of Tabernacles in the Ozarks, Missouri. This was my last feast before college and I coincidentally met quite a few future classmates and made a lot of friends. I'm still in touch with a few of them through Facebook. Things did not however roll along smoothly.

If I remember correctly, it was called youth day. Church services were in the morning and in the afternoon there was a youth volleyball tournament. Prior to the games though there would be a bible bowl trivia competition between church congregations. Teams of four would face off against each other. Because of time constraints there would be only one round.

My siblings and I were gungho to participate in everything and signed up for both. We found enough other similarly inclined bodies to form a volleyball team named The Golden Boys but that is a whole other story. Since there were four of us we didn't need anyone else to form a bible bowl team. In this case we named ourselves the St. Catharines, Canada team because that was our actual church area. We were matched up with Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Of the four of us, only I had any experience in this kind of competition but we did have something in our favour. My parents as a family tradition read from the bible to us every single day for our entire lives up to that point. When it came to basic bible trivia, we rocked. From what I saw throughout the whole competition Tulsa probably would have beaten any other team there but against they didn't have a chance.

I got to hear Tulsa's view of this victory from their perspective. Tracy Williams was on that team and a year later we were college classmates and were in several classes together. She said her pastor who was administering the competition kept going over to them while we were answering questions rubbing their faces in it. “Maybe you kids should study your bibles more. You should be more like these Canadians.”

It gets worse. My parents and I had a miscommunication before the activities. I thought we would eat lunch at our campsite so I didn't bring my casual clothes with, never mind my gym clothes. I went through the whole afternoon wearing a suit. What normal teenager wears a suit to anything besides a church service? Is it any wonder that Tracy hated my guts?

This the first instalment of a series of stories. I will link them all together. They are written because I'm mentally working through something. I really don't care if anyone reads them all and don't expect to do anything with them when I'm done.

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