root beer kegger

my wonderful wife spotted this article. it’s about a group of teens who threw a root beer party. the keg (which was root beer) was noticed and the cops were called. since the cops had arrived at a party of what appeared to be underage drinkers (though it wasn’t) their duty required that they breathalyze ever teen there. this ended up equaling 89 “0.0” readings on the breathalyzer.

this whole incident came about because of some teens being kicked off of the school cheer leading squad. the girls that were kicked off where seen in some facebook photos with red solo cups in their hands. the school administration had no proof of any alcohol being in the cups but in their minds those cups equaled underage drinking and that was enough to remove the girls from being cheer leaders. please don’t assume i’m naive. i know a lot of teens drink and i know that many times those red solo cups are actually full of liquor. yet they’re not always full of anything wrong. i also support 24/7 conduct policies for extracurricular high school activities. i think it’s perfectly appropriate to hold a kid to a higher level of conduct based on him/her being in the band, on a sports team, in student government, etc. yet i think that the administration should always have to have proof when they decided that a teen has done something against the rules. they can’t just make guesses based on broad generalizations and then punish people based on those assumptions. well anyways, the root beer kegger came about when a student decided that he was going to prove to the school administration that just because something looks like it may be against the rules doesn’t actually mean that it is. thus there was a party of teens doing things that looked like they could be breaking the 24/7 policy but actually were in full compliance with it.

of course, i believe it’s even more important that we don’t jump to assumptions, and actions based on those assumptions, within the church. it seems like some people within the bride of CHRIST want to make assumptions concerning the state of someone’s soul or beliefs based on things that they may associated with “sinful” activity or erroneous belief. in fact, sometimes it seems that some people within the church are more concerned with how you say your beliefs than they are with whether or not what you believe is true. there’s a great line in a waterdeep song that goes “not so much about the truth as whether you said it right.” i think that line does a great job of summing up the situation i’m talking about. it seems like we sometimes get so concerned about someone doing something “wrong” that we jump to conclusions to protect the church from heretics.

the problem is that sometimes those assumptions are completely wrong. a root beer kegger proved that.

SIDE NOTE – these are just thoughts mom. nobody has come after me for anything i’ve done or said. i’m a little upset about that because all the apostles were chased around by the religious people for the lives they lead. the apsotles’ faith in JESUS, and the life that resulted form it, ticked off the religious people of that time. i figure if i’m really following JESUS i too should be ticking off a least a few religious people. but don’t worry mom. it’s not happening yet.