Holiday Highlights

As always, we spent Christ­mas in Lou­siana. In addi­tion, I got to spend around 14 hours in a car dri­ving from Lafayette, LA to Louisville, KY for The World Mis­sions Sum­mit. Near­ly 4,000 col­lege stu­dents from Chi Alpha groups across Amer­i­ca gath­ered to con­sid­er their role in God’s glob­al plan. And then I got to spend 14 hours dri­ving back again.
Some high­lights from the trip:

• Get­ting loot for Christ­mas, includ­ing Munchkin.
• Hav­ing Dana decide that dad­dy was her favorite for a lit­tle while.
• Watch­ing my par­ents final­ly get broad­band inter­net ser­vice. Also, fix­ing com­put­ers for both my par­ents and my in-laws.
• Dis­cov­er­ing that Steve Barke has a snore that would cause a dead per­son to search for ear plugs. Also, pur­chas­ing ear plugs.
• Lis­ten­ing to J. Rufus Fears talk about Win­ston Churchill for 12 hours. I’ve long admired Churchill based on what lit­tle I knew about him–now that I know more I’m astound­ed. He was among the great­est of all time.
• Hang­ing out with Greg for 14 hours in a car.
• Dis­cov­er­ing that there are whole stretch­es of road in the South which only receive coun­try and/or rap sta­tions.
• Chat­ting with Lind­sey and Nic­ho­lette about their upcom­ing moves to join us. They’re both such great people–Paula and I can’t wait for them to be here!
• Meet­ing Will Phillips. He was every bit as enter­tain­ing in per­son as I had hoped he would be. For some rea­son he thinks he out-geeks me. Some­day I may have to dis­abuse him of that notion (I con­tribute to Wikipedia, for cry­ing out loud).
• See­ing my old bud Randy Jumper again. We were class­mates at AGTS and have kept in touch dig­i­tal­ly since. Nice to have a face-to-face again.
• Dis­cov­er­ing that Stan­ford frosh John Sill­cox can focus out of each eye sep­a­rate­ly. Freaky.
• Way cool wor­ship in the morn­ing. In an odd turn of events, the morn­ing ser­vices were con­sis­tent­ly 5 to 7 times bet­ter than the evening ser­vices.
• See­ing over 650 stu­dents make a one-year com­mitt­ment to mis­sions with the option for a life­time exten­sion. Woohoo! And they weren’t just sign­ing up for the easy places, either. A lot of closed coun­tries are in for a big sur­prise.
• Watch­ing the amaz­ing lev­el of panache with which the Ascent (a Chi Alpha staff event) was pulled off. Know­ing that Belkas Lehmann and I had planned the whole thing made it extra-spe­cial.
• Get­ting a free copy of Full Gospel, Frac­tured Minds. I’m enjoy­ing it so far, and I’ll post a review when I’m done. Big thanks to Jer­ry Gib­son for hook­ing me up.
• Ran­dom­ly walk­ing around Louisville at dark look­ing for food (which I final­ly dis­cov­ered at a gas sta­tion).
• Final­ly watch­ing The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en.
• Watch­ing The Fan­tas­tic Four and final­ly real­iz­ing that they’re the four ele­ments.
• Hav­ing Dana behave on both flights.