I had somewhat infrequent contact with the church youth group as a high schooler–I wasn’t a regular attendee, but enough of my friends were that I usually had the lowdown on what was happening. I have a personal policy that I don’t turn down invitations to participate in things unless I have an actual conflict (which is, let me tell you, an interesting, rewarding, and occasionally dangerous way to live your life) so when one of my friends said, “Hey, Hell, the youth group is doing a volunteer project and we need people. You in?” I said sure.
She told me to dress for messy outdoor work, and we’d drive there together on Saturday morning. No other details were provided.
So Saturday morning came, and I found myself standing in jeans, steeltoe boots and a tank top in front of a very, very run-down house with about a dozen other teenagers and a couple adults. The adults had that slightly manic look common to youth group leaders, and matching church t-shirts.
They also had half a dozen sledgehammers.
I had a fantastic feeling about how this day was going to go.
The house, they explained, was condemned. It needed to be demolished.
There were words after that about the who and the what and the why (and, presumably, about why they had decided to recruit a bunch of teenagers to do this In The Name Of Jesus) but I was vibrating at a speed that rendered audio waves impossible to decipher and didn’t catch any of it. Something-something-something-jesus, something-something-something-hit things with sledgehammers, don’t hit the marked support beams, Something-something-something-HELL YOU GET TO WRECK THIS HOUSE was basically all that got through.
They said something that my brain interpreted as “GO!”
I had a sledgehammer in my hand and was swinging through the front door faster than a chipmunk on cocaine. Which was wholly unnecessary; the front door was unlocked. I just wanted to do it.
I plowed a straight line through that house from front door through the back wall just because I could, then doubled back to go for some of the fun tile spots. Around me, a dozen sweaty teenagers were going absolutely feral. The ones with sledgehammers were swinging wildly at anything they could reach, and the ones without were kicking holes in the drywall for no reason and prying apart any surface they could get a grip on.
The adults had cleared out about five minutes in; we were left with our sledgehammers and no inhibitions.
These wholesome christian teens had spent most of their lives being proper and helpful, and now, for what may have been the first time, they were being told to be as destructive as they were capable of being, and it immediately went to their heads. We were a swarm of holy termites. We were sledgehammer-bearing tornadoes. We punched holes in that house until there wasn’t any house left to punch holes in.
Did we take out some of the marked support beams on accident? Absolutely. Was this whole plan deeply, deeply unwise? Sure! But we were having a great time!
The teens with sledgehammers mostly got tired and traded off sooner or later, and a couple of us decided that now was the time to solve some universal mysteries for ourselves, like: can I run straight through a wall if I get a far enough running start? Can I kick a door down like in a movie? If we work together, can we throw John right through that drywall?
The answers to these questions was a shining, reverberating YES.
(John was fine, probably.)
By the time we felt that our work was done, the house was just a few upright studs with a roof on top, sitting in a lake of debris. We straggled out on to the front lawn, dragging our sledgehammers, and watched as the adults hooked chains to the remaining beams. The chains were hooked to the back hitch of someone’s Compensator pickup truck, which was being used for its actual function for probably the first time ever. We watched as the truck pulled away from the curb, the chains going tight–
–and with a sound like breaking toothpicks, the beams broke, and the house pancaked in on itself. We cheered like it was the Second Coming.
I don’t know why they had us do this. I don’t even know whose house it was. I just know that there are few joys purer than the joy of wrecking something bigger than you with nothing but the strength of your own arms, and few euphorias more glorious than the feeling of putting a sledgehammer through a front door for no reason at all.
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