For about the last 4 years we have been walking alongside of each other in some intentional ways: talking weekly (to vent, listen, pray, encourage, love, speak truth); read books/blogs together; meeting for a few days together each year to peer into each others lives.   Our friendship has been a very healing thing in my life and become a place to experience more of Christ’s love for me.

So next week I’m flying into Dallas on Monday and we are headed down to Lake Granbury.  Going to just hold ourselves up in a place on the lake and cook together, go hiking, maybe fish a little.  Also we going to be reading Brennan Manning’s new book, The Furious Longing of God and talking through that together.  Check out the trailer for this book below.

Please be praying for us as we put our lives out before each other and Christ.  My biggest hopes/intentions for the week – eat a steak of a charcoal grill, eat some TX bbq, laugh till my face and stomach muscles are sore, be real and be loved – by my friends and my Father.  And thanks Leslie for supporting me in getting away like this.  Expectant.

But I’m even more excited about our speaker who will be with us…Chip Jackson, Teaching Pastor from Fellowship Bible Church in Northwest Arkansas.  The summer before my 7th grade year, Chip Jackson was hired as the Youth Minister at First Baptist Church of Opelika, AL.  About two weeks later Chip and I ended up as roommates at a Centrifuge Youth Camp in North Carolina.  That week marked the beginning of a great friendship that shaped my life over the next 6 years.  He poured into my life and took a special interest in me.  There was much golf, talking about girls, trips to Lake Martin, junk food, Bible study, trips to Six Flags and mission projects with Chip over those years.  There is a passage now that I can’t read without thinking of him…

¹²Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. ¹³Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.  Philippians 3:12-14

It was on a tennis court late one night at another camp when Chip led a group of us in memorizing this passage together…probably in 8th or 9th grade.

We’ve just recently hooked up again and I’m looking forward to spending some time with Chip this next week.  He’s coming in on Wednesday so we will have a chance to hang for a few days before the weekend.  Finding myself looking forward to talking to my old mentor again…still coming to him with stuff I’m struggling with and working through, but now as a young pastor.  Should be a life-giving time for both of us to be together again.

If you’re around Auburn next weekend, join us at Cornerstone on Sunday March 1…Chip will be preaching that day.