Please forgive a small brag about two sets of friends.
This weekend Pam and I had three friends from Baton Rouge come over and spend the weekend with us. Debbie, Megan, and Josh are simply amazing people that I am honored to call friends. All three of them have been a huge influence on me and have shaped how I serve as a minister. They came up to the Upper Midwest to be presenters at the Just Faith Summit (a conference concerning the fight to end human trafficking – yes I not only marry very well but I have impressive friends too). You see together they have written a book (here is a blog post that Debbie wrote about the book) that is basically a commentary on texts from scripture that are difficult for survivors of abuse of human tracking to deal with. So after the conference was finished they drove over to our home and spent a few days with us. This meant that we were able to introduce some of our BR friends to many of our “thread” friends who make up Tapestry (interesting we had a decent number of “threads” out of the country this weekend – I felt very cosmopolitan saying that.😁). I know y’all are cool, but it is really nice hearing friends that we respect from another time in our lives talk about how awesome the people are that make up the church that I am a part of leading.
Of course, I already know that y’all are awesome. Seriously I was thinking today about several recent events in which y’all have gone WAY ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL in an attempt to help people that basically none of y’all knew. I figured it up that in the past two years our little, bitty church has done about $6,000 worth of ministry for people that have no connection to the church and are not part of some program or ministry that we are doing or support. This was work that was done in addition to the regular planned given that is a part of our monthly ministry. It doesn’t count supporting missions, Place of Peace, InterVarsity, Nicaragua, World Vision, or any of our other planned ministries, nor what so many of the “threads” do individually. This was just “threads” hearing of a need in our community and getting together and deciding to do something. One example that many of you know about has just happened in the past two weeks. You guys have been, and regularly are amazing. Still it is a lot of fun to hear people that I know very well and that I think are impressive meet my “thread” friends and quickly realize how impressive you are.
I am so thankful that all of you are my friends (in this case BR and “thread” friends) and I am very grateful to be in ministry with so many of you and for some of you to consider me your pastor.
SIDE NOTE – the only problem with these BR friends is that they are serious night owls and since I really enjoy listening to them (again they are super cool people) I end up staying up far too late. I feel like this has always been the case. I stayed at Josh’s house quite often when I was working on my D.Min and I remember at the time thinking that I would never be ready for my seminars the next day because I enjoyed talking with Josh and the people were often at his house (this regularly included Meg and Debbie).
SIDE SIDE NOTE – my BR friends may be night owls but they are also some of the best people in the world to watch “The Office” with. I love that show, but I have never laughed as hard or as long as while watching it with them.