Stories with Strangers
Greetings, and welcome to week six of Stories with Strangers! I ended up this week going back the my usual Starbucks since last week it took a very long time to get a story that I liked. I went and got my usual latte with 2% milk and this time I believe was a record time for the time it took me to get my story for the week. I sat there at my usual table by the entrance for about half an hour with some questions here and there and then a gentleman named Ben came up to me because he had heard of this guy who sat at a table and bought people coffee for telling him a story which to me was kind of a fun fact. He said he came looking for me last week but didn’t see me which was due to me being at the Blue Sparrow last week. He sat down and opened with a camp story and I knew from that moment was gonna be a good one!
Ben told about the time he went to camp when he was in middle school. It was his first time being away from home by himself and it was his first time at a camp. The camp was a Christian camp and the whole goal of the camp was to share Jesus with you friends. The camp however also did events and competitions within the camp itself to have fun. Ben told me about the camp was split up into four main teams which were the following; yellow, blue, green, and red team. Ben was on the yellow team and they had been the second best team throughout the whole week at camp but it was nearing the end and it also was the last chance yellow had to beat the blue team. However the challenge began with a kid named James on the blue team. James in Ben’s words ,“was a freak of nature.” James was a massive kid for his age being almost 6’6 in middle school and weighing more then two-hundred pounds. The last compeition to compete in as well was none other than tug-of-war. Ben and his team knew that victory was going to be a tough task because of James but they knew they had one obstacle in their way for camp glory. The final day came upon the camp and it was a rainy day with a thick heavy fog covering the camp. The time was upon the yellow team, as they walked up with the yellow paint and their shoes getting stuck in the mud while walking up they were ready for the battle of the day. The yellow team had selected their five and blue had selected theirs. James comes walking up to the back of the rope being the anchor on his team while Ben was the anchor for yellow. The two teams sat there waiting for the whistle to blow and then it did. Both the teams started pulling as hard as they could with the blue team taking the lead slowly. Ben could see the flag in the middle of the rope about to be put onto the blue side so Ben knew he had to give it his all, he screamed letting everything come out at once. The yellow team then followed in his steps and suddenly they all stopped because the whistle had been blown. They had done the impossible against James the giant by coming out with the victory. They had ended up all taking James by surprise when they all pulled harder suddenly, causing James to slip and fall. Ben concluded the story by sharing the glory he and his yellow team felt by overcoming the odds and winning and it was a story to go down in camp history.
Ben was a delight to talk to and listening to him share this story that may sound silly to any normal person, it at the same time sounded so epic and felt like I was listening to a historical event itself. Ben and I continued chatting after the story for another hour just exchanging life stories we had all while sipping a nice cup of joe.
