if i were content, i would go here. and i would be funny and full of interesting, meaningful information about ryan potter, transient youth pastor, keeper of kidneys, feng shui master extrordinare.

It's now official: i am a youth pastor. the bulletin in church on sunday even had my name on the front with all the other "actual" pastors. what's up with that? i keep wondering if the church knows what they are doing, if they somehow have this idealized picture of me. the truth is, i have intentionally been myself, perhaps even more myself than usual, so they won't think i'm someone i'm not. it's just crazy to me that they would let me be IN CHARGE of anything. i know that i really care about the kids, and i really want them to be awesome, and i think i can help, but to be IN CHARGE?? well , i guess even i had to pretend to grow up sometime. it's funny for me to try and think of a highlight from last week- any time i hung out with kids pretty much was a highlight. like JAM last sunday.

What better way to start off a youth ministry than with a waterfight? kicking off any ministry with a waterfight seems like a good idea to me. i would have come to anything in college if it started with a water fight. maybe a "mom's in ministry" meeting wouldn't appreciate a waterfight, but i feel pretty strongly that they should. strange things, water balloons. 2 guys can work hard for 30 minutes to fill as many water balloons as they possibly can, and 30 middle schoolers can use them all in 2 minutes. seems there's a direct relationship between waterballoons and kids having this insatiable urge to nail eachother with them. who knew?

And on thursday i had the first real "incandescence" meeting. "incandescence" is the high school team that, with my supervision, basically runs the middle school group. they are "incandescence" with the quote marks because at this point we needed to call it something, so i stuck with what cami named it 2 years ago. but it's gonna get renamed soon. hopefully to something easier to spell. we had supper together, and then i handed out some stuff that i thought they should know, and we talked about it for a while. and it was so much fun to watch them have fun and want to learn and do well, and have it be because of a meeting that i initiated and organized and arranged.

And as i write this i am sitting at my computer set up in my own house. well, technically, it belongs to the people who will be back in june, but till then, it's mine. i asked the lady if it was ok to move the furniture, and she said "yeah, move some stuff just so you feel at home". there's now not a single piece of furniture in it's original location. but i do feel more at home. i had to take a bunch of pictures of how everything was so i can move it back. for them in june. but i really think my way's better.

So, not only am i living in my own house, but i am now an official youth pastor of Kurume Bible Church, which is much harder to say than KBF. my first official act as the officially hired professional youth pastor was to go to a church council retreat, which has in fact very little to do with youth ministry. but i got to sit around and listen to all these people that i used to be afraid of tell stories about themselves and their children. i even got up the gumption to tell one of my own:

The players: 15 year old ryan, 98 year old security guard, crew of japanese police
The setting: tokorozawa station (the potter kids used this everyday to get to school)
The time: 4:00pm

The fall day was ending crisply, and unsuspectingly our hero made his way to where he had parked his bike that morning on the way to school. As he scanned the rows of bikes, a semi-familiar feeling of annoyance began rising through him, until, when he could bare it no more, he fell to his knees amongst the crowds of people surging around him, raised his head and fists heavenward, and cried in a loud voice, "Why me, God??". For lo, his bike had been stolen. He was left with only 2 clear options: 1. spend the better part of an hour walking home, or 2. return the favor, and steal someone elses bike and use it to ride home. For reasons that will forever remain a mystery, our hero chose the second option, and began to walk around in a clearly nonchalant fashion, one which in no way could have betrayed his true motive, which was, in fact, to check out bikes from the corner of his eye to discern their status: locked? poorly locked? unlocked?

At long last, he found one that would suit his needs. An off road bike, which was about as needed in Japan as a hair dryer in the Savanna, had been locked with a combination lock, and had been, as the ivy that had grown up through the spokes attested, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. Through previous experiences that I'm sure were altruistic in nature, our hero had the skill needed to defeat the simple combination lock, and, knowing that he who hesitates is lost, immediately got down to his unfortunate but necessary business.

No sooner had ten minutes gone by that our hero suddenly felt himself being roughly wrenched to his feet by the collar of his shirt, courtesy of the nearby parking lot security guard, a man who looked about the age my Grampa's Grampa would look. A good, strong 12 inches shorter than the American, he had, it seems, been watching the whole scene unfold, and, far from being sympathetic to the situation that had been forced on the hero of our little story, it seemed that he had it in his head to give this little punk of a kid a few pieces of his mind. The skill in Japanese needed to understand the subject matter of the geriatric, but clearly irate, security guard, was, unfortunately, far above the actual skill level of Ryan, but there was little doubt that, in his day, the security guard had been forced to build a bicycle from a pile of iron ore if he was stranded.

Through this whole experience our hero kept his cool, knowing from experience that these things usually just blow over, and the worst that would happen is he would be going home using his feet instead of using wheels. The panic level of our champion skyrocketed, however, when he realized the security guard was using his radio to call the small police station nearby. Why he chose to stay instead of running will only ever be known to him, and perhaps some choice confidants, but popular opinion is that there was a reason, and it was a good one. The police were on the scene no less than 2 minutes later to relieve the aged guard of his prize. In fact, once they were in sight of the so-called "perpetrator", the 3 police officers that were dispatched broke, unnecessarily, into a full sprint in the middle of a crowded shopping area, causing something of a scene themselves. Now in the hands of the "law", our lead character found himself treated very roughly, complete with arm-behind-the-back submission hold all the way to the police station.

Making the most of the few minutes before the impending interrogation and torture, the champion came up with a plan that had served him well in the past, and would serve him well in the years to come: feign ignorance. The ever-intimidating police would ask a question in Japanese, and would be answered in suspiciously simple Japanese that was so horrible it almost seemed that it might have been intentionally manufactured to sound so. Might. When asked for his phone number, parents name, and school name, this tactic was utilized with astounding success. The only moment of concern came when the fuzz illegally went through his backpack looking for identification or school ID cards, but they were cleverly concealed in the front pocket of the bag, which was so unlikely a place to keep such things that it was not searched.

The police were at a loss as to what to do with this unidentified alien. He had been caught red-handed, so, it was generally agreed that something must be done. Among the few contents of the backpack was a folder of piano music (to add insult to injury our martyr had been subject to a piano lesson that same day). After some discussion, the book of piano music was handed to him, open, along with a simple, one word, unmistakably English command: "SING". In the moment of silent shock that the unfortunate soon-to-be celebrity wondered if there were sufficient cracks in the floor to melt through, a police officer went into the hall of the mini police station and issued a general invitation to the concert of humiliation. The turnout was immediate and overwhelming. Suddenly faced with what certainly felt to be the entire staff of the Japanese self-defense force expecting a vocal concert from a book of piano music, our quick-thinking champion made the executive decision to not sing the "Tarantella", which of course has no words, and is meant for an instrument that is capable of producing multiple tones simultaniously, but rather to sing a contemporary Christian worship song while looking at the book of music. This he did, and performed the critically acclaimed "As The Deer" near flawlessly. This humiliation was seen as sufficient recompense for attempted bike theivery, and he was forcibly and gracelessly expelled from the police station. To walk home.