Fourth

What a terrific month April has been! Lots of traveling, time with family, time with friends, and some great shows with Francesca and crew on the Jeremy Camp We Cry Out tour. 

April started with a two week break from the tour, so I took a week and visited one of my dear friends Richard Menear out in Denver, CO. It was an excellent trip. Got to do some cool touring in and around Denver. We visited Fort Collins, Boulder and Colorado Springs, including some hiking in the Garden of the Gods as well as up in the Rockies to the summit of Mt. Snitkau. That particular hike, up Mt. Snitkau, was both literally and figuratively breathtaking. The latter because the views from the top were simply majestic, and the former because my Nashville lungs barely conquered the change in altitude. I thought I was in good shape, until I was attempting to hike up the side of a mountain that was 13K feet and change... It took a mixture that Richard had concocted ahead of time of chia seeds (yes, THOSE chia seeds, from the goofy clay pets we all had as kids), lemon and water that, whether a placebo effect or not, seemed to give me a renewed energy to get up to the top. Before I drank it, I was curled up next to a rock getting the nasty feeling of extra saliva and a shortness of breath that triggered the feeling that my breakfast may make a reappearance. Thankfully, it did not. Apart from that moment of discomfort, the hike was worth it, and the trip as a whole couldn't have been better. We even had a bit of snow the first morning I was there, and waking up in Richard's flat to a white-capped Denver skyline was a real treat.

When I got home on Good Friday that week, April 6, my parents and their sweet blue tick coon hound, Sadie, were already in Nashville to visit for Easter. We had a great weekend together, got to play some golf with my pops out at Harpeth Hills GC, which I found, for a municipal course, to be actually quite a good track to play. My brother Brad and his family were supposed to come up as well but could not. Continue to pray for Stephanie, Brad's wife, as she recovers from a pulmonary embolism scare that she had back in December. (A blood clot in her lungs, essentially).... Easter Sunday at Cumberland Church was great. It was good to be home at church after about a six week spell of missing my family there, and Andy Stanley gave a terrific sermon on the gospel. 

Had a pretty slow week at home following Easter but now have been out on the road for the last couple of weeks on the We Cry Out tour. We have had some excellent shows, and that included a day off in NYC last Wednesday, where I visited the top of the Empire state building for the first time. Worth doing at least once in your life, trust me. Such an incredible perspective on a massive city. Also have been up in New England this weekend, which before this trip I had never been to. Maine was a beautiful state. I particularly enjoyed Portland and it's fresh lobster.

Lastly, I want to mention a story of a girl I saw at one of our shows last week. I believe it was in Boaz, AL. We were in the middle of the song "Angel By Your Side" and this girl in the front row, who couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old, started sobbing uncontrollably. She was utterly inconsolable. Her friends to her left and right were astonished at the emotion that I don't think they quite knew how to react. For me, I really felt a sense of God's presence. So much so that I had a subdued joy in it, if that makes sense. It brought a huge grin to my face. Not that this girl was crying, because I don't know the source of her tears, and there could be a story of real pain in her life that the lyric and emotion of the song triggered. I smiled not because of that potential pain, but that this girl, at her age, was so deeply moved by a song that expresses the love of her Savior to her. I got this sense through her tears that there was some healing in the moment. To see someone at her age express that type of emotion was extremely moving. We follow "Angel" with a lil intro of "somewhere over the rainbow" that leads into "This is The Stuff" (these are Francesca songs, btw, in case you are confused, except for Rainbow of course)... and in that moment, I come out to the front of the stage along with the rest of the band. I made eye contact with the girl and couldn't help but smile at her, and she returned a huge, half-toothed grin right back. In that instant, I knew that her tears, whether burdened by a deep sadness in her short history on this earth, had a tinge of happiness in them as well. That she, on at least some level, has an understanding of the love of God in her own life. What a reminder, to look on Jesus through the eyes of child. To have faith in him like a kid does, unquestioning, unflappable, with honesty... to remember, that as Jerry Bridges puts it in his book "Discipline of Grace", "Duty or guilt may motivate us for a while, but only a sense of Christ's love for us will motivate us for a lifetime." I've done the duty thing, I've felt the guilt, I am eager to know that love more deeply.