Sunday night, Amy and I were winding up a very good, but very tiring weekend. Our little community of people who like Jesus a lot has begun something of an annual tradition (which means we’ve done it twice now – in our world, that’s a tradition) of heading out to a nearby camp and spending a weekend together. This year there were nearly 100 of us there for two or three days just hanging out and enjoying each other. It’s great, but Texas in August is Texas in August, and the whole thing is laced with much heat and dust. I also had to scramble back to College Station on Sunday afternoon for a wedding.

Anyway, by Sunday night, we were more than a little tired and were starting to settle into the bed a bit earlier than usual. I was preoccupied with something else and Amy was flipping channels when she stumbled upon the genius of the The Karate Kid on a local Spanish channel. She stopped just in time for us to discover that Mr. Myagi saying, "Banzai Danielsan!" translates, "Banzai Danielsan!" and Daniel responding with, "BANZAI!!!!!!!!!" translates, "BANZAI!!!!!!!!!" The rest was dubbed, and not well. All of that, of course, was thrilling to me. Though my long years of high school and college training (absent much subseqent practice) have left me speaking only a broken version of this language, I was prepared to sit and watch the whole movie in Spanish. Excited even. Then something bad happened.

Apparently some parts of the plot don’t translate well in Spanish, and we watched as significant pieces of the story were tragically edited out for no discernable reason. When Daniel’s accusations of Ali’s
snobbery and his subsequent mea culpa were cut such that we were left with no idea of how they got from anger to nuzzling in front of the water slide at Golf N’ Stuff, it was too much. I mean, straight from "¡Eh, me rindo! ¡No disparen!" to "Supongo que sabes lo del torneo de mañana." Unacceptable.

It was at this point that I got out of bed, went to the living room, retrieved my personal copy of this masterpiece, and inserted it into the DVD player. I informed my gracious wife that we would now be watching The Karate Kid in its entirety — no horrendous cuts, no bad overdubs, and no upside down exclamation points. Just Daniel, Mr. Myagi, Ali, and the demise of the Cobra Kai exactly the way God intended them. Amen. So we did. And it was good.

So I’m 31, a husband, a dad, and by some accounts a pastor, and this is my life. And it is good.

P.S. As I assured my wife Sunday evening, I got over Ali a long time ago. No, really.

…but completely understandable.