Last Friday Becky and I headed out to Omaha, NE to see Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God tour. (OK, so it was officially in Elkorn, NE, but that’s just suburban Omaha these days.) My mom graciously agreed to come down and stay with the girls for a couple of days, so we got up Friday morning and headed west. A four-hour drive later we arrived in Omaha, checked into our hotel, ate some lunch, wandered around a mall, etc. Then we headed over to the church for the concert.

This is the second consecutive year that AP and company have played at Bethany Lutheran there in Elkhorn. It’s a beautiful church, a good venue for a concert like this. They were all decorated for Christmas, and their sanctuary, which seats by my estimate around 600 people, was nearly full. So, a good start.

As we were waiting in line for the doors to be opened, one of the organizers came by with little tour fliers and informed us that the artists would be doing a meet-and-greet in the church gym after the doors opened. So, we could go in, stake out a seat, then go “get an autograph”. Since I have 2 autographed posters from last year’s concert stop in Cedar Rapids, once more with a Sharpie didn’t interest me that much; but I was looking forward to greeting some of them who I haven’t seen since last year’s concert. Fortunately for me, there were few attendees for the meet-and-greet, which allowed me some time to talk to Andrew Peterson, Andy & Jill (Phillips) Gullahorn, Cason Cooley, Ben Shive, and to meet Eric Peters for the first time. I found Eric to be a very personable guy and had a good time chatting with him. I had two different fans come up to me and ask which band member I was. :-) As the meet-and-greet was wrapping up, Cason dug a basketball out of a closet and he and Eric and I shot hoops for a few minutes. Those guys have some game, but I could spank ‘em if it came to it - they’re so short! (Props to Andy G for being the token tall guy on the tour, he’s my height; come to think of it, I guess AP is fairly tall as well. But Derek, Sandra, Cason, Eric, Jill? Short. All of em. :-) )

The concert itself was phenomenal as expected. The first half was the usual “rounds” of songs from each individual. Each time one of them finished a song, I was thinking “wow, that’s gonna be hard to top…”. And then the next person would come up and be just as good, if not better. The second half, as usual, was the Behold the Lamb of God album, played straight through. I will confess to missing Andy Osenga, who is back home in Nashville with his due-any-day wife, but Andy G filled in admirably on the electric guitar. Good stuff, all the way through. (If you’re not familiar with this album, you can stream it live from Andy’s website: www.andrew-peterson.com.)

After the concert I spent too much money at the merch table buying Christmas presents and a few albums to fill out my collection. They had a Square Peg Alliance t-shirt, but it came in only one color: Powder Blue. This guy doesn’t look good in Powder Blue. Maybe you can do a more neutral color next time, folks?

I’ve yet to download the pics from the camera to see if any of them turned out; if they did I’ll put them up on Flickr and link them here.