Thursday, December 17, 2009

Why should I doubt my arm?!?


Well, I guess that I will address the throwing soap to/at Rob Bell topic. Here goes....

Friday night my husband, myself and another couple had a double date night. We drove to Indy to attend the Rob Bell Drops Like Stars tour. My husband had already purchased tickets online for the two of us, so our friends did not sit with us. They are glad, .....because I embarrassed them. :/ Sorry guys. Please don't disown me.

I had already read the title book, and yes, I knew that the overall theme of the evening was "suffering", but that did not stop me from bringing along my crazy zany self.

Rob is a great speaker, and I consider him to have a pretty brilliant mind. He also, has a great sense of humor. I was counting on this "said humor" when my impulse created a "stunt".

Let me do a little walk through of the evening for you....

Early in the speech, Rob made reference to a very clever and creatively written college application. It was, HILARIOUS. Kudos to that guy. After reading the applicant's entry, Rob talked about the terms "in the box" & "outside the box" and he even went as far as saying that to people like the guy who filled out the application, the thought process is more like, "...There's a box?"

Ok, fast forward a while. We were told by Rob to look under our seats to find bars of soap. That's right, soap. (He was preparing to do a visual that explained using the process of elimination to discover something inside.) So, he said something along the lines of "everyone needs a bar of soap". Well, we were in row "K". I'm not so sure just how far that is back, but it seemed reasonable to think that it was close enough.... and as people were chattering away and passing out bars of soap, I was thinking back, to myself, about the "in the box" "outside the box" "..there's a box" from earlier. Putting that into action, I realized that Rob was on our side of the stage, and that HE didn't have a bar of soap. He had said that EVERYONE needed a bar, hadn't he? Hmmm.... So, among the chattering, I shouted out "Hey Rob, need a bar?" He asked, "Do I need a bar, ha ha, no, I'm good, thanks." and laughed..... The next part is a little foggy, but I know that at some point he asked me if I thought that I could make it to him, and I was sure that I could. He told me to go for it, and so, yes, I threw a bar of soap over the heads of several rows of people to Rob Bell, on stage, during a speech about suffering. It hit the stage just short of him and skidded all the way to the back curtain. He laughed again and gave me a little bow........At this point his original demonstration continued.....

Fast forward a liiiittle bit later. We were then told that there are index cards and pencils under our chairs for the next part.... Yes, I asked Rob if he wanted me to throw him a pencil as well. I am aware that this made me sound like an absolute lunatic. My way of thinking was that it would emphasize my humor and help me to look LESS like a crazy soap throwing person. You know, kind of smooth things over, so to speak. :/ Ugh....yeah. He made a comment about having protective eye wear & laughed. I told him that "I'm outside the box".

So, it was little more than 24 hours later that I saw something posted on the web about it. I read John Acuff's Stuff Christians Like blog. Ironically, his blog that day was asking people to submit questions for him to use in his upcoming interview with, none other than, you guessed it.... Mr. Rob Bell. There, about 2/3 of the way down on the comments section was an entry from a lady that asked what Rob was *really* thinking when the lady threw the bar of soap AT him on Friday night at Indy.... gulp. At him?!? It was TO him! Yikes! TO him!! :S It was also mentioned on his facebook page. :s

Oh crap. I AM a crazy soap throwing person. Oh dear. And my friends had teased me too! It must have been awful.... really bad. Oh my.... Gasp!

Now I was headed in a downward spiral from "sort of silly" to wearing a straight jacket at the loony bin. I could just picture it: No more soap demonstrations the Drops Like Stars tour, because of my display.... Rob's wife saying to him, "honey, I think you should take a break from touring. Your critics are mean, and now people are trying to hit you with soap"... People calling me crazy on web pages.... My picture posted by the doors at the Murat & all other future Rob Bell tour stops with the words "PUBLIC MENACE: NO ADMITTANCE" below it.... My facebook friends all block me, and my Twitter followers plummet from the whopping 8 down to 2....I would never be asked to speak to a church group again, because we all know that soap throwing lunatics have no place in leadership of any kind..... and no one would ever read my well intended devotional type blogs again..... :O

At this point flashbacks of the sign posted on the door came to me. The night was being taped for the Drops Like Stars video, and by attending, we gave consent to Rob Bell & company to use our image. Holy crap. Now I pictured the incident being played back in slow motion from the film. What's worse, we had even taken a picture of that post because we were bummed that we couldn't take our cameras inside. Yip, that's the pic that I posted at the start of the blog.


I felt totally embarrassed and misunderstood. I felt like.... like Spongebob Squarepants!Yes! That's it! I felt like Spongebob in the episode when he rips his pants: He has a good joke going, and he thrives off of the laughter. Making people laugh is a fuel to him. Eventually, he plans the biggest laugh of them all, but it goes terribly terribly wrong. He pretends to drown, and everyone is appalled. Yip, that was me. Me & Spongebob. That's the way we roll. We planned big, but didn't think things through.

Spongebob reconciled with his friends through a beach style rock song..... I think that if I tried this with Rob Bell, that I may end up with a protective order against me, so I'm going to just hope that he took it as humor. He did laugh, and say "there's a box?" in response to me :) I hope that everyone else also found humor in this whole thing. I have to tell you that I thought that my pastor was going to literally fall off of his seat laughing when we talked about it.


I posted lighthearted responses on those web pages, and received a complimentary note in my inbox last night. Apparently, someone at the show besides just me and my husband did interpret it as intended. *BIG siiiiigh of relief. ;)

*And just for the record, let it be known that the soap was thrown TO him, and not AT him. The man has enough critics out there without the people that find him insightful beating him up! ha ha

1 comment:

  1. Wow! Wish we'd have been there!
    Now I'll never look at a bar of soap without thinking about you!

    Blessings--
    Dana

    ReplyDelete