I Was Board This Week

This past week was the Free Methodist Bible Quizzing Final competition. Last year the competition was held in Seattle, Washington. That trip took us all the way across the country. This year, the competition was held right here in my hometown, at Roberts Wesleyan College, so our trip was far less.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with Bible Quizzing, it is a competition where the participants are asked questions from a predetermined section of scripture. They sit on chairs and jump into the air at the end of the question. Pads that sit on the chairs register the order in which each person stands.

The contestants then take turns answering the question in the order in which they jumped. Until, that is, someone gets the answer right; then a new question is asked and the entire jumping process is repeated.

You might think that Bible Quizzers are a jumpy lot, but that would be jumping to conclusions.

Since  this competition was held at my alma mater, I thought I would be quite comfortable. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The first night I found that the bunk I was sleeping on was quite hard and I awoke as stiff as a proverbial board.

Apparently, sleeping on hard mattresses does not affect young people. When they weren’t quizzing, I saw Quizzers, who range from 6th graders to seniors, out for early morning runs, playing Frisbee before dinner, and a few of them actually doing one-armed cartwheels, amongst just a few active endeavors. (When I was young I couldn’t even do a two- armed cart wheel. I tried a few times but found the results to be an embarrassment and a danger to my health.)

That was how my day went, watching these young people jumping, running, and, cartwheeling; all the while I worked on stretching out stiff muscles from sleeping on my hard mattress.

I thought and thought of a way to make my bunk more comfortable. And so in the middle of the day I broke the rules, and sneaked off campus and back to my house. I cut a piece of plywood the same size as my mattress. Then I covertly brought that board back to campus and up to my dorm room.

Putting that sheet of plywood over the mattress was amazing. It was almost like sleeping on a fluffy cloud.

Almost.

But, I still didn’t try to do a cartwheel.