“Now you’ve already seen him crush through a wall of ice 8 feet thick tonight. I felt on top of the world and even allowed myself to wonder whether he would find me attractive if we were stuck in an elevator together. The women in the audience raised up a collective giggle. Don’t be fooled by his massive exterior ladies, he’s a got a teddy bear heart.” Bo is no pansy, folks, he stands 6’5” and weighs in at 322 pounds. “He gave his heart to the Lord Jesus Christ eight years ago. One of them would stand before us as John Jacobs narrated for us something along these lines.Ī giant of a male specimen would stand before us, his muscles quivering in the spotlights like a Clydesdale’s. Huge, hulking men with a clear message for Christ in between acts of wonder – changing the world, one head-bashed brick at a time. There must have been at least seven of them.

Over the course of the next two hours, we were awed by these modern-day Sampsons. Beaming Scott and I herded in with the crowd to take our seats in one of the balconies. He had even worn his muscle shirt which read “Jesus!” across the front, where the middle “s” was in the shape of a lightning bolt. That’s right, John Jacobs and the Power Team had come to our town. We, along with half the city it seemed, were headed to the city arena where we would watch gape-jawed as muscle-encased men bent rebar with their teeth and broke blocks of fiery ice with their foreheads. This wasn’t just any field trip, mind you. But when it was field trip time, it was Gus’s time to shine. When the church board expressed concern about a potential lawsuit, its Sunday morning glory ride was retired soon after. Unfortunately, there were only one or two kids who actually needed a ride and there seemed to be a bit of a debate as to whether they were coming with their parents’ permission or not. We even spent one whole Saturday throwing day-glo paint at it in an attempt to make it the coolest vehicle for Christ in all of Colorado Springs. We’d had a pancake supper to raise enough funds to buy it secondhand, with the intention of being able to bus kids to church on Sunday who didn’t have rides. The bus, whose name was “Gus” for God’s Ultimate Servant, had been our project the previous year.

That fateful weekend, we boarded the Youth Group bus along with 30 or so other hormonal teens for a field trip. In the final analysis, I simply refuse to acknowledge that this tear in my spiritual hymen was entirely our fault. We could hardly be blamed for a little hormonal playtime. Sure, we’d snuck off to the back stairway a few times to make out. There was no flag raised in the days leading up to the earth-shattering event that read: THE END IS NEAR! How it managed to sneak up like that when we were trying to be so spiritual is beyond my comprehension. Sold down the river to some guy named Jed. But my spiritual virginity was as good as gone. Being the good little Evangelical girl I was, I was saving that for my wedding night. I lost my virginity thanks to a Youth Group outing and a group of impossibly large men.

Post haste humble tx