Can't go over it, can't go under it...
have to go through it.
Have any of you ever been on a lion hunt? I'm not talking African Safari here people. Please. I'm talking about a good ol' fashion lion hunt right in your living room. Perhaps I am revealing too much about the mental state of my family but... this was a frequent adventure we took in my childhood during Family Home Evening. I'm going to describe it to you. Don't try to normalize it. You can't. It's not.
So it starts out with everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor and Grandpa Hutch in his big chair. We slap our hand on our legs and then clap them to get a beat going. Oh yes, this is real. Then we start chanting to the beat, repeating whatever Grandpa says:
"We're going on a lion hunt,"
"we're going on a lion hunt, "
"gonna catch a lion,"
"gonna catch a lion...."
and so on and so forth. Generally you would do things like climb up a tree and scramble through some bushes and swim across a water hole until you found a lion. But then the lion would see you. The beat kicks up about 100 notches and you slap clap slap clap as fast as you can and do the whole hunt backwards swimming back accross the water hole, through the bushes, up the tree, and away from the lion. Phew, you're safe. That is unless Grandpa decides to get creative... like the one time our lion hunt took us in a space ship and we ended up on Kolob. As in "If You Could Hie To Kolob". Yeah, our Grandpa is sometimes very imaginative :)
Well just in case you didn't get enough of the lion hunt at the family gatherings, we also had a book to supplement in the off season. In the lion hunt book, every time you came to an obstacle (like the watering hole which was actually a puddle from the back yard hose or the monkey bars which were supposedly tree branches to swing on) you would have to say, "Can't go over it..... can't go under it.... have to go through it." And then you'd tackle that obstacle and move on the the next all in an effort to get closer to that dang lion.
We loved it as little kids, laughed at is as teenagers, and now suddenly faced with something I absolutely do not under any circumstances want to go through, I found myself reflecting on it as some kind of life lesson. Who would have guessed.
We got our assignment for next semester.
Yeah. Student teaching again.
And you know what, I even planned on it this time. You know, because plans never work out right? So I figured, perfect, I'll make all these plans for student teaching and then just because I've spent hours, heck months agonizing over these plans, we won't get to use my carefully crafted life agenda! (AKA full time job eh?) But then it did work. We got a phone call assigning our student teaching to the very place where I had picked out a beyond perfect apartment (and a gym, and a favorite grocery store, and a hospital to work at...get real I've been in nursing school for three years. If there's one thing I know, its how to be thorough). But the night before we moved in, our housing plan fell through.
So here I sit under my glittery popcorn ceiling staring at my microwave and blender conveniently located in the living room trying to get excited about staying here. Of course its more complicated than that. We can only stay here a very limited time longer until the owner moves back in. But after mentally exploring every option and avenue over the past 4 months on what our next step would be, every way to go over it, under it, around it, and then watching all those doors close, well, we just have to go through it.
We had a dream of a plan A and a really great backup plan B and some rather mediocre plans C, D, E.... but given the turn of events, none of them seems to make sense any more. So instead we pick this:
Have any of you ever been on a lion hunt? I'm not talking African Safari here people. Please. I'm talking about a good ol' fashion lion hunt right in your living room. Perhaps I am revealing too much about the mental state of my family but... this was a frequent adventure we took in my childhood during Family Home Evening. I'm going to describe it to you. Don't try to normalize it. You can't. It's not.
So it starts out with everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor and Grandpa Hutch in his big chair. We slap our hand on our legs and then clap them to get a beat going. Oh yes, this is real. Then we start chanting to the beat, repeating whatever Grandpa says:
"We're going on a lion hunt,"
"we're going on a lion hunt, "
"gonna catch a lion,"
"gonna catch a lion...."
and so on and so forth. Generally you would do things like climb up a tree and scramble through some bushes and swim across a water hole until you found a lion. But then the lion would see you. The beat kicks up about 100 notches and you slap clap slap clap as fast as you can and do the whole hunt backwards swimming back accross the water hole, through the bushes, up the tree, and away from the lion. Phew, you're safe. That is unless Grandpa decides to get creative... like the one time our lion hunt took us in a space ship and we ended up on Kolob. As in "If You Could Hie To Kolob". Yeah, our Grandpa is sometimes very imaginative :)
Well just in case you didn't get enough of the lion hunt at the family gatherings, we also had a book to supplement in the off season. In the lion hunt book, every time you came to an obstacle (like the watering hole which was actually a puddle from the back yard hose or the monkey bars which were supposedly tree branches to swing on) you would have to say, "Can't go over it..... can't go under it.... have to go through it." And then you'd tackle that obstacle and move on the the next all in an effort to get closer to that dang lion.
We loved it as little kids, laughed at is as teenagers, and now suddenly faced with something I absolutely do not under any circumstances want to go through, I found myself reflecting on it as some kind of life lesson. Who would have guessed.
We got our assignment for next semester.
Yeah. Student teaching again.
And you know what, I even planned on it this time. You know, because plans never work out right? So I figured, perfect, I'll make all these plans for student teaching and then just because I've spent hours, heck months agonizing over these plans, we won't get to use my carefully crafted life agenda! (AKA full time job eh?) But then it did work. We got a phone call assigning our student teaching to the very place where I had picked out a beyond perfect apartment (and a gym, and a favorite grocery store, and a hospital to work at...get real I've been in nursing school for three years. If there's one thing I know, its how to be thorough). But the night before we moved in, our housing plan fell through.
So here I sit under my glittery popcorn ceiling staring at my microwave and blender conveniently located in the living room trying to get excited about staying here. Of course its more complicated than that. We can only stay here a very limited time longer until the owner moves back in. But after mentally exploring every option and avenue over the past 4 months on what our next step would be, every way to go over it, under it, around it, and then watching all those doors close, well, we just have to go through it.
We had a dream of a plan A and a really great backup plan B and some rather mediocre plans C, D, E.... but given the turn of events, none of them seems to make sense any more. So instead we pick this:
be still and know that I am God."
Doctrine and Covenants 101:16
Be still.
That's the plan.
Well for January anyway.
And in February,
I suppose we'll just make a February plan.
Comments
Post a Comment