Boxed Brother

When you are wrinkled and confined to a rocking chair what will you remember about the life you  lived?

Here’s a list of things of five things I won’t remember…

1. How much money I made throughout my life
2. What brand of shoes I wore to my 7^th grade basketball tournament
3. My cumulative GPA from high school
4. Boyle’s Law
5. The score of Super Bowl XVIII

Here’s a list of five things I will remember…

1. Pooping my pants in a taxi in Vietnam
2. Tasting Lord’s Supper for the first time
3. Forgetting the opening line of our play in 8^th grade (and whispering a cuss under my breath
   into the mic)
4. Looking at Kayla Laurila’s sepia-toned picture for the first time
5. Carrying my newborn brother Noah to the car 

What’s the difference? The “Won’t List” is data and the “Will List” is moments.

Data is important, but it’s not memorable.

Data is necessary, but it rarely makes you cry tears of joy.

People make moments memorable. The only thing we can take into the Kingdom of God are the People of God – those memory makers we meet along the trek of life.

This weekend I made a memory with some amazing people to add to the “Will List.”

I wanted to surprise my sister before Christmas. I haven’t seen her all semester and really missed her. Hannah lives in Hangzhou and I live in Beijing. Hangzhou is 794 miles south of Beijing, comparable to Milwaukee and Oklahoma City. I hopped on a bullet train to Shanghai, met up with my friend Dan Tyrell and then snuck into Hangzhou under the cover of smog. Tony Bartels met us in the train station. Hannah Schmiege met us at the subway stop. The operation was underway. I could feel my heart pounding. I was nervous Sissy would see me walking on the street or see her on a bus. I felt like a bank robber in a John Wayne movie returning to the town that he had pillaged.

Schmiege had found a me-sized box during the week and fetched it from the basement of their apartment. Sissy was on the sixth floor. We were whispering. Man, I felt so alive!

I crawled in the box and put my head between my knees. It was quite the squeeze. Then they taped me closed and taped an old postage address on the top to make it seem legit. Schmiege and her friend Catherine called Sissy’s phone while Tony and Dan scrambled behind a parked car to catch the memory on video.

Sissy didn’t answer her phone.

Then they tried the doorbell. But it was broken, so Catherine had to hike six flights of stairs and get her. Meanwhile I’m in a box taped shut crumpled up trying to impersonate a piece of origami, breathing my own breath (which was not delightful) and feeling claustrophobia set in. I was taking short rapid breaths because of the insane nerves and also because I was just recycling my own CO2. Which was giving me déjà vu of the time I ran out of oxygen while scuba diving in the Philippines last year. Totally I was in the box for about seven minutes.

Finally I hear a loud Wisconsinite voice coming down the stairs. The moment had arrived!

“Hannah the mailman dropped this off for you.”

“It’s probably a block of anthrax.”

She kicks the box with her big boot

“That’s a big block of anthrax.”

“What is it? It could be a body!”

Schmiege hands her a scissors.

“I don’t like this…”

She starts cutting the tape and then sees my head of hair, but doesn’t know it’s me.

“AAAAHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHH!” she screams as she recoils in fear.

Then I poke my head through the opening in the box, and her screams of terror morph into tears of joy.

Check out the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffr-BJJHK64

Even though my joints will rust and my hairline will continue its speedy retreat, this memory will not!