"Katie, I really need to find something else for you to do while I'm driving." - Rob

This weekend I went on a FOCUS trip with eight of my team members. We spent the entire weekend hanging out with middle and high school kids at a church about an hour from campus. We had a blast! (Well, except for that no sleep part... about that...)

On Saturday afternoon the youth all loaded their van and our team of eight piled into Rob's family's '91 Taurus. We were literally piled on top of each other... Three of us were shoved in the front seat where we each hardly had enough room to breathe. Liz was talking with her hands one time and almost hit Rob (our driver) in the head. If the car would have crashed, I would have taken a hockey stick to the appendix... As squished as we were, the people in the second seat had it much worse off. There were four of them squeezed to the point where they were sitting on top of each other. Gena's pet alligator, Pete, was poking Liz in the head, Tara's knees couldn't move, and Carrie had baby powder everywhere (Pete, the hockey stick, and the baby powder are another story for another time... don't ask... my FOCUS team is a bit... er... odd... er... AMAZING!).

We were told this would be a five minute drive, we didn't understand that by "five minutes" the youth leader meant "at least thirty minutes." I don't know how many of you have ridden with Rob behind the wheel and lived to tell the tale, but according to Natalie, "Rob driving is enough to get anyone praying!" We were all praying piled into this station wagon like sardines in a car... Rob had to floor the gas petal in order to get us to move a all. We were lucky not to rear-end anyone because they stopped too quickly... Honestly, I think if we'd have gone over a speed bump we would have lost some car parts because we were riding that low to the ground. The youth in the van were teasing us because we weren't keeping up with them, but really we were going as fast as we could! So, we're all terrified and piled in too close together; it's raining and we're not sure if we're going to make it out of the car alive... We realized in the trunk of the station wagon was our buddy Keith, who plays Jesus in every skit we do, was fast asleep. So there we were, terrified we were going to die and Jesus is in the back sleeping... Sound familiar?

It is safe to say we made it to our destination and back to the church without anyone dying, but there were some close calls!

<>< Katie

"A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion." Mark 4:37-38a