When Hearing Your Truth Makes Your Friends Gasp
My story of hazing in church
Have you ever had the experience of telling stories of your childhood to a group of friends, and those stories make them gasp out loud? I have.
I was in college. It was late at night, hanging out with my roommate and suitemates. We were recalling memories from our childhoods, and I was telling some stories from my church upbringing.
Sharing the initiation story from my youth group was telling. My friends had never heard the term “swirlie” before, and I had to explain the phenomenon of forcefully holding someone upside down with their head in the bowl of the toilet and flushing.
The sixth-grade girls were yanked out of their beds in the middle of the night during our first youth group trip of the year for this; the youth minister led the charge, recruiting the older boys of the group to participate in these assaults.
I was spared the misery, thankfully, as my hair was so long at that point that I could sit on it. I had this very real fear that my hair would flush down the toilet and get stuck in the pipes. I lost sleep in the days leading up to the…
