A Month of Facts about Dru: Day Twenty-three

Today's true story:

I laid hands, once, on an inanimate object.

Summer, 2003. I was down in Newport Beach on a Summer Project (basically a stateside, beach-based missions trip) with Campus Crusade for Christ. There were, I think, 54 of us crowded into one small apartment complex. I think the place had six apartments with two bedrooms (and one bathroom) each. It still ended up being like four or five people per bedroom. Pretty crowded conditions.

Back in those days, wireless internet was not as widespread, and not very many of us had laptops with us from what I remember. We had one old desktop PC that we kept in my apartment's living area, and it was a communal machine connected to a modem so we could have the internet. Pretty much everyone used it that summer.

Well, sometime in the middle of that summer, that PC broke down. I remember we couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, but it wasn't working. Some of the the other guys were tech-savvy and they pretty much gave up trying to fix it. I think someone even opened up the tower to examine the circuit boards and stuff, all to no avail. We were getting desperate.

Eventually, several of us guys gathered around the PC. We were out of ideas and decided to try prayer. One of us, possibly me, thought it might help if we laid hands on the tower, to maybe heal it. So we all placed our hands on it and a couple of us said a prayer over the computer. Then we plugged it back in and hooked it up to the monitor and tried to turn it on. I don't remember exactly what the problem was, but the computer was still dead and useless. Maybe our faith wasn't strong enough, or maybe God was teaching us a lesson, or maybe I should just stop typing before I get vaporized by lightning or something.

After that, I think we just threw it away, and someone else kind of lived in the Orange County area and brought his own computer for us to share.

I guess it was ridiculous and blasphemous for us to pray for the computer, let alone lay our hands on it and hope for some miraculous healing. Not gonna lie, I don't think any of us could keep a straight face when we did that. I really don't know why we did that in the first place. It was probably my idea because I thought it would be funny. And then someone, somehow, pondered my joke half-seriously and decided it would be worth trying.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I reined in my impulses. But I don't know if I could ever do that. I guess I'll just be a kid forever.