JYPO

We got back to doing street outreaches in Athens and we were also trying to get into other places like schools. On another day off, some of us decided to go on a day trip to Corinth where my parents had once been taken to the police station. One of the coolest things about Corinth is the acropolis and subsequent fortifications built atop a very large hill behind town. We went up there to explore and I stood on top of a post at one of the highest spots overlooking the bay and did a Julius Caesar by crying out, “I came, I saw, I conquered”.

Back in Piraeus, a few of us decided to start a secret society. It all started with THE ROOM. It was at the end of the hall where they stored extra mattresses and beds. I’m sure we weren’t supposed to be in there but once we found it, it surreptitiously became our hangout. We also built a fort out of the materials at hand.

It was built in a corner of the room with natural walls on two sides and the other two made of mattresses. Part of the top was also made of mattresses but there was an opening in the back. One of the challenges we gave ourselves was to bounce high enough off the beds on the bottom of the fort to get our heads high enough through the hole above the top mattresses to take a picture. I owned that challenge.

There were three of us - Joe and Lucy from the USA and me. As we began hanging out there, Joe came up with the idea of forming the secret society. We called it The Jeremiah Young Prophets Organization, or JYPO and our password was “eschatology”. We didn’t know what the organization was for but we kept minutes of our meetings and came up with the following rules so transcribed:

1. Sneeze out the sneeze hole

2. Open 24 hours/day

3. No sleeping in

4. Initiation: Dance the Patrick

5. Song: “Joy to the World” by 3 Dog Night

6. Code: Jeremiah was a prophet

7. Motto: The spirit of the prophets are subject to the prophets

As far as sneezing, the room was very dusty and people would often sneeze. There was a hole built into the side of the fort so we designated that the sneeze hole so that people wouldn’t be sneezing all over each other. We decided that, as Christians, we didn’t want people sleeping willy-nilly in the fort, so that’s why we decided that nobody could sleep in. That rule was later amended to allow napping, one person at a time but no sleeping in at night.

As for the initiation, there was a leader on our outreach team named Patrick. At one of the outreaches, Patrick stepped in to cover a role in one of the dramas we performed on the streets and the part called for him to dance…and it was hilarious. He had no rhythm and his movements were very awkward. So when we formed JYPO, we decided that if you wanted to join, you had to dance “The Patrick”.

For membership criteria, the only stipulations we made were that you could not be too serious or too silly. We all held official positions. Joe was the President and Resident Prophet. I was Master of Jokery and Commander-in-Chief of the Non-Existent Army. Lucy was Secretary of State. It was she who kept the minutes.

We started asking others who fit our criteria if they wanted to join. But we could only ask one at a time because whenever a new person joined, they had to begin as the new 48-hour peon before they were appointed to any other role. We made Patrick an honorary member but weren’t going to actually invite him. If he found out about it, we probably would have been kicked out of the room. We started to experience a few issues with our rules, which led to our second amendment. “All rules under extenuating circumstances subject to interpretation by tribunal.” 

As our secret society got more involved, we began to see a drawback. We noticed that we, as the members of JYPO, were starting to separate ourselves from the rest of the group. That wasn’t good for the unity we needed for the outreach. So, three days after we formed, at only five members strong, we decided to disband. Perhaps we would pick it back up once the outreach was complete. But for now we decided to sacrifice our witticism for the greater good. The next day there was a big clean up of the building and our fort was taken down.

Some of us boiz doing our GQ impression

Veni, vidi, vici atop the Corinth acropolis

Owning the JYPO challenge


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bit of A Wander

That summer our family went travelling. My father had a speaking engagement at a YWAM base on the island of Cyprus so he took us with him. Cyprus is an island in the eastern Mediterranean that has been contested by Greece and Turkey for many years. It is now an independent country but Turkey still controls the northeast. The YWAM base was right near the border between the two sides. We were told not to go up into the nearby hills because there were land mines. From there we traveled to Israel. We stayed in an apartment in the new part of Jerusalem, arranged for by a Messianic Jewish friend we had known in Hawaii. For some reason, Samuel and I spent a lot of time at the apartment playing cards but we did get to see a lot of the sights.  We got to run on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. We went inside the Dome of the Rock or Al Aqsa Mosque, which is built on the site of the destroyed Jewish temple. It is holy to the Muslims because that is where Muhammed was supposed to have a...
Read more

A Challenge

Image
That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...
Read more

Outer Banksious

Image
We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...
Read more