I think it really hit me when I saw the dirt bike. I hadn’t seen that dirt bike in years, but I remembered the story behind it. It had been bought cheap, fixed up in a garage, and when finally complete, was brought to a party at a friends’ house in the country. The owner rode it first, then handed the helmet to my wife. She proceeded to take it on a loop of the property, then lost control and ended up riding the thing directly into the corner of a limestone barn. Becky recovered within a couple of weeks from her spill, but when I saw the dirt bike sitting out waiting to be loaded into a moving trunk on Monday afternoon, I realized it had set for the last seven years with a bent rim waiting to be repaired.

On one hand you could say “come on, a bent rim, that’s an easy fix, why has it taken so long to fix it?”, and you’d be right. But having been friends with the owners of that bike for the past ten years, I know the stories of how life has intervened. Her chronic illness. His serious infection that cost him the vision in one eye. (No small thing for a pilot!) The business start-up. Later, the provision of a flying job. (Can you believe they let a one-eyed pilot fly 747s? I can.) The births of two delightful children. The struggles and joys of families, friends, church. I can very well understand why that dirt bike still has a bent rim. (On a side note: I wonder what projects I have sitting in the garage that still need completed…)

Monday afternoon I helped load the contents of these friends’ house into a long moving van. Assuming all went well yesterday, they drove the eight hours and arrived in Indiana where they are moving to be closer to family. With his gone-17-days-at-a-time work schedule, it makes sense for them, but we still hate to see them go.

Life has chapters, but there are no chapter titles. We can only turn the pages and see where this next chapter takes us. I look forward to an upcoming chapter that sees us visiting those friends in Indiana, and I have only one request for them: once you get the bike fixed, let somebody other than my wife ride it first.

This week business took me on my second-ever cross-the-border trip, once again to Canada, though this time to a part of Canada (Toronto) that felt much less alien then last time (Montreal). Something about them still speaking English in Ontario makes it a little more comfortable.

Anyhow, there wasn’t much time for sight-seeing as we sandwiched a day of customer meetings and round-trip travel into a 48-hour window, but I did get the chance to finally meet, in person, some “weird internet friends”: Dan, Laura, and Wally. First, a little photographic evidence, then, the narrative.

Dan and Laura:

Wally, Dan, and me:

It should come as no real surprise by now to anyone that reads this blog that I have a group of “weird internet friends”. We’ve had some visit in our home, and met up with others in Minneapolis, Nashville, Lincoln, and Charlotte. Each time I’ve found them to be decent, enjoyable people, and we’ve had great times visiting. I had a little extra anticipation this time, though; Dan and I had hit it off so well online that I figured our in-person meeting would either be brilliant or amazingly awkward.

This meeting fell into the brilliant category. Without minimizing my enjoyment of Wally’s company at all, I have to say that Dan and Laura felt less like new acquaintances and more like long-lost family. We had a fantastic time visiting, eating dinner, and drinking coffee far too late into the evening.

While it is a nearly 12-hour drive from Toronto to Cedar Rapids, I extended the invitation to Dan and Laura that I’d extend to any of my weird internet friends (and you know who you are) – any time you have a long weekend and want to come visit, we have a spare bedroom, an expandable dining room table, and all the excitement of Eastern Iowa for you to enjoy on your visit. Hope to see you soon.

I’ll work through that title backwards. How do you know when you have some musical kinship with someone else? How about when they pull out that obscure song that they really like and want you to hear… and it’s a song you’ve been playing on repeat on your iPod for weeks?

That very thing happened last night at Nick and Allie’s house. After the Iowa Songwriter’s Guild house show I hung out for a while to hear some of Allie’s new hymntunes and to generally talk music with Nick, and he pulled out The Khrusty Brothers’ Sympathy for Jesus. What a great song. That provoked a discussion on Don Chaffer and Waterdeep, and ended up with Nick lending me all of his Waterdeep CDs so I can take a listen. So far, so good.

Earlier in the evening Nick & Allie hosted the Iowa Songwriters’ Guild monthly meeting, which this month was a special house show. Each of the writers played a couple of songs, and I quite enjoyed hearing folks share their talent. I was motivated to try to dust off my long-neglected songwriting chops; what remains to be seen is if that motivation will last long enough to actually write anything. Nick did send a book on songwriting home with me, though, so I’ll have to take a look at it. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Good friends aren’t afraid to say hard things.

Last night I had a friend tell me: “Hey, Chris, this church search blog thing is cool, but you need to get your butt in gear and actually get to church.”

Now, he and I both understand that we’ve had good reasons for not getting to church the past two weeks, and his comment was somewhat in jest, but still, that’s the kind of thing a reliable friend will tell you. I’m blessed to have a friend like that.

• Your house doesn’t have to be amazingly clean to invite friends over.
• Even if it was amazingly clean when the night starts, it won’t be when it ends. Not with 4 kids playing for three hours.
• That’s OK. You can always clean up again.
• Good food + good conversation = a great time.
• Hearing friends’ back stories is fantastic.
• When your friends read your blog, you have to try to remember which stories you’ve already blogged and thus shouldn’t re-tell.
• We should do this more often.

I got home about 2:30 this morning from two days in Minneapolis at the Desiring God 06 National Conference. Richard and I got up there Friday afternoon, and after a tasty dinner at Brit’s Pub, we perused the massive book sale before heading in for session one.

I’ll just thumbnail the conference in this post, then if I’m motivated I may post more in depth in future posts. If you want to get a good summary of the conference speakers, go to challies.com. Amazing how much info he’s got on there.

The opening night speaker was David Wells; he’s a professor at a seminary in Massachussets, a charming older British gent who spoke on The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World. Good stuff.

After the opening session I walked 8 blocks or so over to Block E to meet several folks from the dot net. It was fun to get to meet these people face to face; Erik and Rhea, Mike and Rachel (and little 3-week old Emma), Rae and Amy, and Jamie.

Saturday morning brought a continued quality slate of speakers: Voddie Baucham, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, and Don Carson. They were very good, excellent, best of the conference, and somewhat academic, but still thoughtful, respectively.

We took off right after Don Carson spoke in the evening and high-tailed it back to Iowa. Richard still had to be at church for Sunday morning; I got my brother Andrew to lead music for me so I could sleep in. Thanks bub!

It has been a nice morning thus far. I got up at my usual early hour, got motivated enough to go run (woohoo! it feels good.) and then decided somewhat on a whim (and also influenced by the absence of any milk in the house for my cereal) to go grab a light breakfast at the little restaurant in the Hy-Vee grocery store. I took my Bible along to read a little, and figured it’d be a nice way to get the morning started.

Not two minutes after I walked in, Sam walked in behind me. He and I used to have breakfast there on a regular basis, but my busy schedule put an end to that a couple of months ago. So it was really serendipitous this morning to have him show up and join me for breakfast. We got to chat for a bit, mostly about work and stuff, but still just good to catch up.

So Lord, I hope You’re not too put off that I didn’t read like I was planning to; that one Psalm was good stuff, though. I will assume that You decided it was more important that I visit with Sam this morning. And I’m OK with that. Thanks.