Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King

There are moments in life, where the ridiculously precarious awkwardness of your situation can elicit only one response: laughter. This past Sunday, I had one of these rare bittersweet moments, where you laugh more because of the stupidity of the situation that you find yourself in, and not really in the fact that the situation is actually “funny”. To be frank, the situation, in most of these scenarios, is hardly ever funny at all. You shouldn’t be laughing–it’s almost obnoxious and inappropriate to laugh. At best, you should be grieving. At worst, you should be depressed beyond repair. But no. You find yourself laughing. You don’t even know why you’re laughing, you just are. There are two examples of this that I would like to give before I get to my Sunday story.

I once heard a story about how my English Teacher from High School witnessed, for the first time in his life, someone die before his very eyes. But, in his description of the situation, he thought it was one of the funniest things he had ever seen in his life. After he shared his story, the class kind of just offered this half confused, half incredulous expression back, as “what the hells” (wtf is you’re not Christian) where painted on the students faces. The reason why, is because my English teacher shared such a graphic and grotesque story with such a nonchalant attitude, it was almost alarming. As he was driving home from work one day, he saw someone crossing the street on a red light. Unbeknown to this poor unattentive soul, there was a car flying down the street about to cross the green light (which was his right to do so). As a result of this most unfortunate circumstance, the car collided with the pedestrian traveling at a rate of over forty miles an hour, and literally catapulted this human being fifty-seventy feet into the air! The poor, and now deceased (he died on impact) human being, collapsed onto the ground, lifeless, almost like a dummy who had just been thrown off a building for some dramatically fake movie effect.

Now. How can this situation ever cause anyone to laugh! It almost seems appalling that this situation can make anyone laugh. But my English Teacher told me that this experience was one of the funniest experiences he had ever encountered because the body being thrown into the air was something you see out of some comedic sitcom or movie–you know, in those scenes where a body gets flung up into the air (and you know its fake), and the body transforms from a real person to a dummy and then lands on the ground somehow magically transforming back into being a real person again, hardly having any scratches on his body and definitely not dead. Well…this was his justification for laughter. And the whole class started laughing not really because the story was all that funny but because it was absolutely ridiculous for us to think that someone could ever laugh at something like that.

Second scenario. Two days before three finals you realize that you have five books to read, one paper to write, and a crapload of other stuff and only twenty four hours to do it (unfortunately for me, this is a true story). Somewhere in the 24th hour of not sleeping at all and cramming in three entire classes worth of knowledge in a very short compact period of time, you start to laugh. Or at least I did. It’s not even delirious laughter. It’s more like: I am the biggest freaking retard on the face on this planet, laughter. It’s a laughter that shouldn’t happen, but it does. For some unknown odd reason, it’s the damned funniest thing that has ever happened to you–you’re in such a stupid situation, that you can only do one thing: laugh.

Now that you kind of know where I’m coming from let me tell you about this past Sunday. I went to my parents church, and it was really awesome to see them again, since I haven’t seen them in a long time. My mom wanted me to come out both so that they could celebrate my birthday early with me, and also so that I could go with them to a “convalescent” home, where their church had been going to in order to hold worship services at this place. Not really knowing what I was getting myself into, I went.

We get there, and at first everything is normal. Once we walk into the building however…oh man. I could not believe at home close to death (i mean no offense, but it was kind of saddening!) that everyone in that building was! It WAS MIND boggling! Like I know I’m talking about it so non nonchalantly (part of why death is such a taboo thing in our society is cause no one wants to ever talk about it), but it was seriously insane. Grandma’s and Grandpa’s hanging onto their lives, lonely, depressed, isolated from society: I will never send my parents to one of these.

So anyways, so far, although a bit depressing, so good. Life goes on, right, and death happens. So we’re in this place, and we do this worship service which literally half of the convalescent home shows up for (remember, they are all OLD, lonely and partially senile people). I can’t help but feel so bad for them. I didn’t understand why they would EVER come to this worship service! I mean no offense. I love my dad, I love my mom, and I love that church, they are all very cool cute people. But it’s a BUNCH OF ASIAN men and women, who hardly know how to speak english, putting on a worship service with a bunch of old grandma and grandpa’s (none of whom are Asian) who hardly understand the broken english that is being spoken in the mic. I wish I could have taken a picture: it was classic.

It was quite sad, though, to think that they are so lonely that the would actually come out to this service. Even more sad that most of them probably actually don’t have a relationship with God. But that discussion is for another day.

And now here’s the kicker. During the closing moments of the worship service, my dad plays a song. Here are the lyrics to the song.

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King!
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King!
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah we are going to see the King!

No more dying there, we are going to see the King!
No more dying there, we are going to see the King!
No more dying there, we are going to see the King!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we are going to see the King!

That, my dear friends, is comedy.