Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing-or reading-related question and answer it on their blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.
There's one more hour of Wednesday left in Nova Scotia land, and it's time to take a road trip.
This Week's Topic: "The winds in Washokey make people crazy."
It's the first line of Kirstin Hubbard's novel LIKE MANDARIN, and if you'd like to win an ARC of LIKE MANDARIN, you should check out this contest at YA Highway.
The prompt for this week is to write about a time you did something completely crazy. I am not a crazy person by nature, but as I thought about the question throughout the day, I realized that all the crazy things I've done involve either God, like when I joined the leadership team for my school's Christian Fellowship this year, or meeting awesome online friends in an inspiring setting, like at a Missy Higgins concert in Toronto. The craziest thing I've done involves God, awesome friends, an inspiring setting.
I've been chatting online since I was twelve, which for the record, I don't recommend as it means there's lots of evidence of your twelve-year-old self all over teh interwebz. The first message board I ever participated on was on, wait for it, Neopets. Neopets had guilds, which were groups that people who shared a common interest could join. I was in a Canadian Idol one (this story just gets better and better, doesn't it?), and I started chatting with the other members of the guild. I became close to one girl who was a couple years older than me, who happened to live in Nova Scotia as well, though she lived a few hours away from me. She was a Christian, and I wasn't (but at twelve, my theology was, uh, completely wrong). She was always encouraging me to open my mind to Christianity, and not in a pushy way. She taught me about it and answered all of my questions without judgement.
One day, she told me she was going to be a counsellor at a Bible camp, and asked me to come. I was never the kind of kid who went to camp, other than few dance day camps (actually, the craziest thing I may have done was co-choreograph and perform a routine to "Space Cowboy" by N*SYNC), because I was awkward and just didn't know how to handle situations where I didn't know anyone. Also, I still wasn't a Christian at this point, so going to a Bible camp wasn't too appealing. I expected to be judged there, and I knew that there would be many conversations that I just wouldn't be comfortable with. But this girl honestly was my best friend, and I knew this might be the only chance I got to hang out with her, so I had to go.
To sum up, I went to a Christian camp when I wasn't a Christian and hated the idea of camp, to meet someone I met online. Not like me at all.
But it was incredible. My friend was just who she was online and I spent an awesome week with her. I will admit to having a couple issues with the people there, but we were twelve, so that's to be expected. Overall, though, they were great. The best part? That's where I was saved.
I don't take risks often, but every now and then I do something that surprises me, and it always seems to work out, even if it's just a bad decision that I learn tons from. Mostly, though, my moments of insanity have shown me a world I wouldn't have known otherwise.
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