My practice is to post here on Mondays and Thursdays. As it happens, April Fools’ Day is on a Monday this year, and I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts on the subject.
Prankstering is a thing. Certain kinds of people really enjoy playing tricks on people, and certain others—fewer, I suspect, than the number of pranksters—genuinely enjoy having tricks played on them.
Grace and peace to them all, and may they have a delightful time on this day.
In my younger years I engaged in some of that myself. I remember attending a wedding with my mother as a college student, and some attenders wanted to do some stuff to the getaway car, so I popped the lock and let them in. I still remember the look of surprise and concern on my mom’s face at the ease with which I got access to the locked car.
In the next few years I found that my excitement and joy at playing tricks on people was diminishing, and today I can say that I haven’t done any of that for a long time.
There are lots of wedding pranks. You get access to the honeymoon suite and put the groom’s underwear in the freezer. You shave his chest. You soap the car windows, paint signs on the rear window, put a noisemaker in the exhaust pipe, tie cans to the rear bumper, fill the inside with balloons. And so grooms make a practice of hiding the car.
I recall when a friend of mine—a buddy from BJU’s judo demonstration team—got married, and the rest of us on the team decided we were going to find his car, get into it, and do nothing but tape a hundred-dollar bill to the steering wheel with a note wishing the two of them a happy honeymoon. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the car, and he never got the hundred bucks.
Another time a former roommate called me at my GA apartment on a Friday night and asked if he could spend the night there. He was getting married the next day, and he didn’t trust what his groomsmen might do to him that night. He knew he could trust me. That opportunity, and that trust, I took as a privilege, and since then I’ve made it my desire to be the guy people could trust in similar situations.
For a few years I’d post this every April 1: “Yes, I know what day it is. No, I’m not going to lie to my friends.”
It occurs to me that that sounds pretty judgmental.
I don’t think it’s a lie to play a prank on a friend—if you know he’ll enjoy it, if it won’t be an unpleasant experience for him. Nothing wrong with good clean fun.
But not everybody finds that kind of thing, or specific instances of that kind of thing, fun. People trying to have a baby don’t find the topic humorous. Oh, you’re not really pregnant? Ha, ha, ha.
A tech newsletter I subscribe to came out this past weekend with a bunch of ideas for pranking your friends using computers. You can switch the keyboard assignments, so whenever they type an “e” it sends an “I” to their screen / file.
Ha, ha, ha.
What if your friend needs to send an important email at that moment? What if he’s got to get some work done on a tight deadline? How long will it take him to figure this thing out and fix it?
How would you feel in that situation?
Ha, ha, ha? I don’t think so.
And the larger principle of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind. I don’t want to be the kind of person that others will be inclined to distrust, because I’ve fooled them one time too many.
So I don’t do the April Fools’ thing. It’s a personal choice, a preference.
But I also don’t sit in judgment on people who get their jollies that way.
As long as we love God and love our neighbors, always seeking their good, even if at our own expense, we’ll be just fine.
Enjoy the day.