How do YOU respond to STRESS?

I'm genuinely amused at how people deal with and respond to stress. Even more interesting to me is to observe how several individuals respond to the EXACT SAME stressful occurrence!

Let me share one such happenstance that we encountered last night on the way home from a group Bible study...

After the Study, my friends Lisa, Blythe, Kelly and I went out to eat. At around 10pm we left the restaurant. Blythe had driven to the restaurant in her car and Lisa & I had ridden over with Kelly. We said our goodbyes and Lisa & I jumped in Kelly's jeep to go back to the church to pick up our cars. Well, of course, we were talking and laughing and having a great time when, all of the sudden, we all (apparently simultaneously) realized that we were going the wrong way - merging backwards onto the LBJ Freeway!!!!! I'd read about things like this happening before. Usually some crazy drunk driver would merge onto the off ramp and emerge into the oncoming traffic contra-flow style. The documented results have never been good. I think this may have happened in some Chris Farley movie also.

Anyways, don't ask me how we did this...but we did...and it was crazy. Ultimately, no harm was done, we just reversed the jeep and backed down the off ramp back to the feeder road. One backwards U-turn and we were back on track.

What was so interesting, however (only in hindsight of course), were our individual responses to the aforementioned stressor:

Kelly, the driver, made some statements that I can't repeat (apologies accepted; no harm done - we love ya Kelly!).

I was in the backseat, clutching my sonic cup tightly, and screamed "Oh sweet Jesus, we're gonna DIE!!".

Lisa, on the other hand, sat in the passenger's seat, hands neatly folded in her lap and calmly says, "Oh, this is quite interesting. I'm so glad we could accompany you on your inaugural trip backwards down the freeway."

And the random guy on his bicycle (yes, there was some guy on the interstate on his bike at 10pm!) looked pretty startled and almost toppled right over as he kept looking over his shoulder at us!

{I thought about changing the names to protect the innocent, but there's not a one of us who won't tell you this story ourselves! I was still laughing this morning - so hard I was crying!}