Sleepovers on School Nights

As introverts and dedicated students in high school, my group of friends does not get together outside of school all that often.  It's not that we don't like to spend time with each other, but that we like to focus on school.  Also, if we get together too often we easily exhaust ourselves because most of us our introverts and need time by ourselves to recharge.  That being said, this year we decided that we were going to do social things together more often.  After all, this was our last year in high school, and we wanted to enjoy it with each other!  A few of my friends created a list of things that they wanted to do while they were still in high school.  The list included quite a few things, including having a sleepover on a school night. 

Although we had a sleepover on the night before the first day of school, we decided to have another one in the last couple of weeks of school.  However, this time we decided to have it on the roof of one of my friends(it's a flat roof).  It was the perfect temperature to sleep outside, and there aren't too many bugs yet this time of year.  We checked the forecast and saw that rain was a possibility, but decided to go for it anyway.  We stayed up late playing a card game that ended with all of us losing.  We proceeded to stay up until about 2:30a.m. talking.

After the chatter had died down, the others drifted off to sleep.  I however, remained wide awake.  At 3 or 3:30a.m. I felt a little bitty sprinkle.  I shook the person next to me awake and she sat there for a second as if deciding if I was telling the truth about the rain or not.  After she realized that it was indeed raining, it became a very quick jumble and scramble as we all shoved our blankets through the window and jumped through ourselves in order to get inside.

As we all settled into various sleeping areas inside and fell asleep there, I realized I was actually glad that it had rained.  Not because it gave me an excuse to sleep on a bed, or because it gave me something to blog about, but because it had given me another story.  Much like one of my first blogs about a border-line disaster involving a balloon and a crazy fed-ex delivery man, I am thankful that God gives me stories to remember.  He has shown me that the things most valuable in life are the memories that I can look back on and remember with joy.  I might not have remembered sleeping on my friend's roof on a school night had it been like any other sleepover, but it wasn't.  It rained and we had to jump through the window to get inside.  That memory is much more valuable than many other possessions that I own, because it is something filled with laughter for me. :)

Living in Reckless Abandonment for Jesucristo, 
Jo