The Best Part of Waking Up............................... Is Soldiers in Your Cup

Or rather, the best part of coming home from a long week is finding a spattering of green army men and a rat-nasty yellow chair in your front yard, a door mat with a weird birdhouse on it, tinsel and signs saying "This Thanksgiving, Eat Chicken... *Heart* Tom Turkey" Hmm. Who are these people? And why have they not come forward? I do not understand. I have covered the obvious bases. Willie! is innocent. Casey was sick. Deana told me about seeing the chair before I got home (maybe that's a cover.. but I doubt it). The first gut reaction was DeeDee and Becky, cause I missed her birthday party... but they seem clueless too. Whoever you are you have had me. I am had. And I salute you publicly. Good game. Tell me who you are.

Always something I wonder when I'm gone for a week is if I'm missed. It's a silly thing to wonder, but it is at the core of my curiousity. Did anyone even know I was gone? I'm gone alot. It's becoming more frequent.

People can convince themselves of anything when they are trying to stand in a Southwest line. "That? That's not the line. Obviously only people who are standing UP can hold a place in line." Total abandonment of any rational thought or any consideration for fellow man. This guy also happened to be decked out from head to toe in Harley-Davidson gear. I'm just sayin.

Seriously, he thought he was going to cut infront of 12 people because they were not standing up. Wow. I was really nice, but WOW. That guy was seriously delusional. And I think he got away with it somehow. He turned a perfectly orderly line into a funnel of frenzy. Felt like it was wartime Russia and everyone was biting, kicking and grabbing for the last potato.

But my cause was upheld and the sweet man in the very front of the line let me infront of him after the evil chaos creator busted my chops and the chops of 7 sweet ladies from Nebraska.

And Molnar, I met Gary from BRI in that very same line if you are reading this. We chatted about you for a bit. It was eerie.

Also eerie is that upon wandering the strip in Vegas on a nite that we weren't scheduled to be there, going the absolute wrong way from where we were going, we ran smack into the Sullivans. SO very random. Shared three years of intense life on the b-ball team with their daughter and my folks spent three years with them in the stands. It brought tears to my eyes to see them so randomly. Randomly. Ha. As if anything is really random.

As if me asking God to show himself to me in the worldliest of places, among the worldiest of people, in my skeptical heart would go unanswered. By random conversations. By people talking about Jesus on the tee box much to the chagrin of everyone in the stands. By the woman sitting next to me on the plane reading "Dinner with a Perfect Stranger." By the beauty of his creation. By the lack of him, actually. The emptiness that is there when he is not. I could feel it. And it's cold, lonely, hard and sad but it feels normal, you know.. not sacred. You know when you have been in sacred moments. When you are on the octobery front porch sipping tea laughing talking with your girl crush and your favorite brother. When you have tears streaming down your face at the car wash on the phone to your best friend because you aren't sure of anything except for the fact that you don't know shit and a hand wax is way too expensive when there are starving people around. When you see that there are quite a handful of folks who could have "lawn art-ed" your house when you were gone and you find out that you were indeed missed. When you realize that you are sorta stealing this line of thinking from a book called Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, but keep writing it just the same because it just rings true and I don't think he'd mind. I like the sacred moments.