The One About The Yoga Pants

OK, so I promised in the last post about She Speaks that I would make good on the yoga pants and ice, so here it is.

Saturday night was pretty emotionally intense (as you could probably gather from the last post), so a few of us decide after the last session to hang out and chill a little before we called it a night [all my 331 girls - where da party at?]. We’re all planning on meeting in one room, but I want to run by my room and check on my roommate, who, as it turns out, was being smart and responsible and trying to get some sleep. Me? Not so much. Yes, I had to drive 5 hours home the next day, but whatever, right?

OK, so go there with me. Once in my room, I find myself faced with a dilemma. It’s late, and I’m quite tired at this point of the “business casual” outfit I’ve been wearing all day (I don’t even know if it was really “business casual”, that’s just what the registration letter said we had to wear, so I was pretending. Those of you who have known me for a while would have been proud - it actually involved a hint of a really girly shade of purple). I want to change, but I didn’t pack anything un-business casual. So what do I do?

If you guessed “put on your lamest-looking, too-short-for-your-unshaven-legs, faded black yoga pants you brought to sleep in”, you totally win. Oh, and top those babies off with my ancient $4.99 baseball shirt from Goody’s and I’m rockin’ - a total vision of splendor. All I have to do now is make it from my room all the way down to the third floor without anyone seeing me.

So I ride the elevator down and when I get off, I take a right instead of a left (or vice versa) and have to walk all the way around the third floor (which, by the way, openly encircles the lobby area). The embarrassment already rising, I turn the corner and who do I run into? Lysa “the big cheese” (lowercase letters because I know she’d hate being called that when Jesus is really The Big Cheese) TerKeurst, still dressed in her gorgeous, way nicer than business casual clothes, with her hair still perfectly coiffed. Fabulous.

Now it might be good for me to pause here and mention to those of you who aren’t familiar with Proverbs 31 Ministries that Lysa is the president of the organization (and if you are one of the ones who didn’t know that, you then you owe it to yourself to jump over to www.proverbs31.org and get an education). This was my second year at She Speaks now, and while in the past Lysa and I have sat at the same table at least once, sat next to each other twice (different tables, but still next to each other), and even stood inches from each other while talking to other people, we had never met up to this point. I’d met a lot of people at P31, but not Lysa. Now I finally had the chance to say hi and what am I wearing? Not anything even remotely business casual. If I was going for first impressions, this was certainly going to leave one.

So I suck it up and introduce myself. Oh no, wait - that’s the Samantha that isn’t ridiculously embarrassed in these kinds of situations. No, instead, normal freak-out me takes over and I duck my head, speed up, and attempt to use her youngest child as a buffer between us (she was helping mom remove some chairs from their suite…which in retrospect I could have offered to do for her since the chairs weighed about as much as she did).

While in this act of avoiding the one person I had been trying to meet all weekend like she was an exboyfriend I wished I could forget I ever dated, I’m looking down at the ground and practically run into another member of the P31 speaker team. I can’t tell you how grateful I was that it turned out to be someone I already knew pretty well, and that she was in her pjs too! We took one look at each other and had to laugh. Then she pointed out that at least I had on my cute new tennis shoes…

So there you have it - my embarrassing moment in the yoga pants (the ones that I’m seriously consider burning just in case I might ever think about taking them as my only alternative clothing to someplace like that again). Never did get to meet Lysa, by the way – I met her amazing assistant (who I’m very glad to have met), but not her. God has used her in huge ways more than once to absolutely change my life, and I couldn’t even get up the guts to say hi. Yep, I’m amazing.

Well that covers the pants, but it took up a lot of space to tell it with enough flare to merit a “story”, so the ice will have to wait. Sorry (but not so sorry about getting so much mileage out of this…).

But before I checkout of this post, I have a little something for all my 331 girls. It seems that more people than just the kids in our youth group think I look and act like Ellen Page, the girl from Juno. Seriously, I’ve heard it enough now that I think if I were creating a new blog it might be called “Juno at 30”. So I’ve decided to just own it. E-Free, this one’s especially for you: