Super Bowl Sunday once again found Kevin herding a bunch of screaming/whining Jr. High students in front of a TV and trying to keep them from killing each other under the guise of actually watching the Super Bowl.

After experienced gained from the disaster of last years Jr. High Youth Group Super Bowl Party, the youth pastor and I both decided that it might be better to skip the whole Super Bowl party idea and just take the Jr. High kids to the Recreation Center at our local community college.  Sara Hutchinson, the Junior High Girls Sunday School teacher and my partner in this Jr. High Youth Group asylum, disagreed.  So, at the last minute we gathered together the kids that had showed up for Youth Group and transported them to my apartment for lack of a better place.

Since I know next to nothing about football, much less who is even playing in this game, I pretended to care about what was going on with my usually gusto.  Invariably I would be asked by a Junior Higher, “Which team are you rooting for?”

Well, I would turn that right around on them!  “What team are YOU rooting for?” I would respond.  They would, of course, be only too eager to disclose their team favorite at which I would respond with some statement of just how lousy their team was and how the other one was going to win the Super Bowl.  This would of course prompt them to leap upon my back pounding their fists into my head and screaming about how, “No, my team is better!” and “How can you like the [Insert Other Team Name]?”

This could get me into trouble when I happened to notice when one of those football people would grab that stupid shaped ball and run really fast away from all those other guys.  I of course would jump to my feet screaming, “Go! GO! GO!!!”  At this point some random Junior High kid would yell, “Hey, I thought you were rooting for [Insert Other Team Name]!”

The long standing tradition of Youth Group is that we never watch the Half Time Show, and after what happened last year it’s just as well that we did not.  Since this whole event was thrown together on the fly, we did not have a devotional thought prepared for the half time intermission.  However the movie, “Tora Tora Tora” was sitting in my DVD player half finished from the night before.  I turned that on and much to my amazement, the kids were interested.  I explained about the attack on Pearl Harbor and the reasons why it happened.  One student, Jimmy, asked if we could skip the rest of the Super Bowl and just finish this movie.

In conclusion, I survived another Jr. High Super Bowl party and have 364 days to recuperate.