Kids These Days.

The church in the Jesus Town held it's annual picnic yesterday afternoon. Usually they reserve the cow palace at the local park for such an event, but it was previously booked. (And yes, it's actually called the cow palace). Instead, they rented out the local Jesus Town Reserves Armory. It's technically on the park grounds and is the only place in the Jesus Town, outside of the school gyms, that can accommodate large groups.

For those of you who haven't frequented your local armory lately, let me refresh your memory of its amenities. The main room is unairconditioned with a row of windows on one wall about 25 feet from the ground. They did provide a fan for the room which was about 2 feet in diameter for a room that was easily 500 x 500 feet. It did wonders, as you can imagine. I know the whole point of the picnic is to get together away from the church building, but I'm thinking the nice air conditioned Family Life Center of the church would have been preferable to the sweltering heat of that room. It was almost like we were setting that world record for most people in a sauna that I posted the other day.

Anyway, for the meal, they had set up rows of tables and folding metal chairs, which compliment nicely the unfinished concrete floor. While we were sitting there, a couple of 7 year olds started running through all of the tables and chasing one another. After a few minutes, the boy tripped on something and about planted his face on the cold concrete floor. The preacher's son, who's a couple of years younger than me, pointed it out to the Mom and I. (Unfortunately, I had missed the one almost entertaining moment of the evening.) I couldn't believe that whoever was the parents of these kids had let them run around in the middle of a meal for that long. I turned to him and asked him if he knew what would have happened to us if we had been running around like that when we were that age. And he answered that his parents would have tripped him themselves and followed it with a, 'I told you you'd get hurt if you ran around like that.' Ah, the good ole days of aggressive parenting.