Guest Feature: Patty Reed's Awkward Life

Patty (originally named Patricia) is the awesomest girl ever. Sometimes when I think of frogs, I'm reminded of her. She is super cool and loves eating potatoes and doing YoungLife and has a car and lives in Kent County, MD (the good Kent Co) and understands my passion/affair with John Deere. But she is not a hick. She is cool and appreciates culture...agriculture that is.

And here is her story.
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Hide and seek is an excellent game.  It’s a great source of fun for hours for people of all ages.  Seriously, my kudos to the person who came up with the idea.  However, this game can easily lead to some very awkward situations—like realizing you’ve been hiding for a while and no one is actually looking for you or having to sit by yourself in tight spaces for long periods of time.  This particular story happens to involve both.

Recently, I was at an annual overnight conference for a ministry that I am a part of.  After the evening session on the first night, a few of us went into a large open ballroom in the center of the hotel to sit and talk before going off to sleep.  Now, this is a strange room because there is a large waterfall structure at the back of the room, against a large glass wall that looks over to the pool area, and the walls are covered with windows from the hotel rooms that are adjacent to the ballroom.  The room was set up with dozens of round tables and there were a few people sitting at one towards the middle of the room.  So, naturally, we chose a large table over on the far right so as to avoid interrupting the group already there. 

So we’ve been there talking for a solid 20 minutes by now, mostly about how weird it is that hotel rooms look out into the ballroom (I mean seriously, who needs that?), when we hear a muffled voice say “So I don’t mean to freak you out, but, ummmm, my friends and I are playing hide and seek annnnd, well I’ve been under here for a while.”  As this is happening we are all looking around in complete confusion until it dawns on us.  There is someone under the table.

So we lift up the tablecloth and sure enough, there’s a kid wearing thick, dark-framed, hipster glasses and skinny jeans sitting on the floor under the table.  Like I said, we’d been there for about 20 minutes when this all happens, and we didn’t see him crawl under there, so he had been there the entire time.  I’m actually pretty impressed we didn’t accidentally kick him in the face.  After a few minutes of keeping him concealed as a small group of his friends walked through the ballroom, he cautiously crawls out, ready to find a new spot.  We had learned by this time that his name was Matt and he was not at the same conference we were at, which meant a lot of our conversation (which had been about our ministry) probably sounded super weird to him.

But it doesn’t end there.  As he is standing next to our table planning his next course of action, he’s caught off guard by a group of his friends that entered the ballroom.  One of them says, “dude, where have you been?!”  A strange question since they’re playing hide and seek, right?  Matt answers that he’s been hiding of course and his friend retorts, “we’re not playing hide and seek we’re playing tag!”

There it was.  Not only had he been hiding under our table for the entirety of the time we were there, but he wasn’t even supposed to be hiding.  All in all, a pretty excellent dose of awkward.