Flashback Friday!

Okay. I'm going to begin a series of "Flashback Friday" posts each Friday where I recall a random event of the past and share it with the public. It may be significant, it may not. That's moreso for you to decide than me. Either way, it's a part of our past (or one of our pasts).

This picture is... me. hahahaha. While in Japan in 2005 with the Navigators, we played a "scavenger hunt"-style game where us foreigners dressed up like random people, and because of my long hair and beard, I was asked to be the homeless person. So, yes. That's me sleeping in a box in the middle of a shopping area.

Now for the funny part. A police officer was watching over the area and noticed me in the distance. At this point, I actually started dozing off because the students were taking so long to find me. The officer came up to me and was yelling something that I definitely wasn't able to understand. In Japanese, I was trying to calm the situation down by saying, "It's a game! It's a game!" So Mark Rood comes running down the shopping center to get the officer's attention to detail the situation and get me off the hook. The officer tried to clarify that I could "pretend" to be homeless, but I couldn't actually sleep in a box. So we moved post a little bit, and I just sat on the box instead. Once the students saw that Mark was talking to me and the officer, they realized that it was me. The reason why they didn't find me was because they were truly scared that I was an actual homeless person, and they didn't want to intrude on my rest. Out of this respect, they left me alone. The police officer even said I was scaring some of the parents of the kids.

What started as such a simple game ended up being a complicated situation and a scaring moment for half of the people in the shopping area. Good times. hahaha.