Life on a stick

I fair’d it. Yesterday I paid $5 and took the fair express bus from the MG transit station down to the great Minnesota Get Together with hundreds, thousands of other people.

At the fair where people-watching and disturbing smells abound, you can get just about everything on a stick. Ostrich on a stick. Chocolate-covered bacon on a stick. Deep-fried veggies on a stick. Hot dish on a stick—tater tot hotdish dipped in breading, deep-fried and then served with a side of cream of mushroom soup. I’ve kind of wondered about the stick schtick. Is it because putting it on a stick makes it easier to eat? Maybe it started with the corn dog? It’s so much easier to eat than a regular hot dog and you don’t have to touch it at all…which is important germ-wise after using the restrooms or walking through the animal barns at the fair. The user-friendliness of sticks caught on and spread to other foods perhaps?

For work, I volunteered to work the booth in the education building. My fellow booth workers and I passed out rulers; as we did this, one of my friends liked to say “inches on a stick…and no extra charge for centimeters.”

After I worked I wandered around aimlessly with various sets of friends, taking it all in while still trying to pay careful attention to where I was going. Every two seconds I was either running into someone (or they were running into me, for which I would still say “sorry”) or about to step on something that I wish would stay in the animal barns. Later into the evening with a couple of friends, I found myself watching the go-karts zip around this small track, as we ate our chocolate malts which we got right next to the sculptures carved out of butter in the dairy building. We watched quietly until one of my friends asked what we thought the go-kart worker would say if we asked him for life advice. I pondered this as I watched the guy all in blue listlessly help direct and then eventually drag in one of the go-karts into the corral. I wondered if these go-kart workers travel around and do this as their fulltime job? Like, next do they go set up shop at the Iowa state fair? Or is this just a parttime gig that they do for two weeks just for the Minnesota state fair, just for some extra cash? It just doesn’t seem like the type of job that a church youth group or women’s club could volunteer to do. But, back to the question at hand, what would that dude down there tell me if I asked him to give me some quick life advice? Life on a stick, if you will. If he had to put life on a stick for me, to make it easier to swallow, what would he say?

Alone on the bus ride home, tired after 9 hours of fairing it (I’m kind of proud of myself for making it that long!), sweaty, I began to wonder how I would hand life on a stick to someone. If I was only given a couple sentences, what would I say? Because with a stick, there is only so much room. Its not like you can heap on extra as you would if you were serving in a bowl.

I kept coming back to my favorite Bible verses from Romans 5. I think I’d just say there is hope. With God next to you, in you, for you, there is hope. And it's a hope that does not disappoint. The end. And if there was still room on the stick, I'd tell them to go check out Romans 5: 1-5.

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.