And the moral of the story is...

In honor of Lizzle's comment about how life's stories start and end all the time, here is a small story from my life which I can finally tell because I've put the required work into it.

Back in middle school, I attended a youth group for a while - partially because I wanted to see if I could find God, but mostly because I wanted to hang out with my best friend.

One night, I got into a strange little game with my best friend and her younger brother.  I had decided that only I could drink from the water fountain; they were not allowed.  There was a small battle for ownership of the water fountain which culminated in me carrying out my threat to spit a mouthful of water on my friend's brother if he got too close.  However, at this point my single weapon for defending the water fountain was spent, and so my now-wet enemy made his way to the fountain and filled up his mouth with water just as I had before.  Terrified, I bolted from the room.

I ran outside of the church looking for a place to hide.  Looking across the lawn, I saw a bush in the distance.  I quickly formulated the following plan:



I decided that time was running short and that this was as good a plan as any, so I decided to go for it.  Unfortunately, me being me, that's not actually how it worked out.



Yeah.  I ended up trapped in a blackberry bush several feet below the ground-level I had previously been running on.  I tried pulling myself out, but, as I already pointed out, this was a BLACKBERRY BUSH.  I ended up shouting for help for about twenty minutes before somebody found me.

I found out later from my best friend (who I scared half-to-death with the whole thing - if you ever read this, I'm sorry!) that because of the weird echo effect from the church wall I had fallen near, my shouting sounded like a party down the road rather than a trapped teenage girl.  Amazingly, the only wounds I sustained were scratches - I'm really lucky I didn't break a leg or poke out an eye.

My favorite part of the story is that which I indicated in the title of the post.  The moral of this story can be boiled down to one common phrase: "Look before you leap."  You know, the sad thing is that I feel like if I was faced with a similar situation today, I'd still probably take the leap.  I'm still just a little too impulsive and a little too jumpy (ooh, bad accidental pun) in scary situations.

P.S.  Yes, I changed the layout just to accommodate the MS Paint pictures.  I wish there was another way, and I think there is, but I'm too lazy to find it.  Someday I will.

Also, here is a partial draft of one of the pictures in which I accidentally made myself look like the flying spawn of Satan.