all my exes live in Colorado

Due to the overwhelming landslide vote, this is the big new post…

The summer before my freshman year in college, I was on one of two run-down, worn-out stereotypical church buses on my way to a youth conference – my last hurrah with my youth group before heading off to college in the fall.  As with any church trip with 100+ teenagers, one of the buses broke down and after filling the functioning bus to the maximum capacity, a handful of us were stranded at Long John Silver’s – hours between home and our final destination – waiting for vans coming from home to deliver us to our much anticipated conference.  We waited so long that our Long John Silver’s paper cups lost their rigidity and began leaking after too many free refills.  We napped on the benches.  We played cards.  We took pictures.  We talked.  We waited.  After hours of waiting, we find out the vans aren’t coming.  A local minister is going to take us the rest of the way on a borrowed people mover.

This wouldn’t be the last time that I’d spend hours in transit with this high-energy, ballcap wearing, toothy grinned savior of ours.  A few months later, I was in a van with him every Tuesday night with a handful of others, driving to a women’s prison to learn from him how to do ministry.  Not long after that, at a dive restuarant, eating foot long chili dogs and slurping milkshakes.  A year later, we were in that same people mover driving to Mexico to build walls and roofs and hang ceilings.  That next summer, we drove to a retreat to plan a year of campus ministry.  My senior year, that same people mover that saved a group of teenagers on their way to a youth conference, broke down on the way home from Mexico.  

That’s a short list of just some of the trips we took.  His dad taught me to do ministry and he taught me how to do ministry - just as his dad had taught him how.

I graduated from college, moved on and away, but still went back to visit occasionally.  One semester after I graduated, he and his family moved to Colorado to do ministry there.  They are so lucky to have him and even though I’m gone, I was selfishly so sad to see him go.

I saw him this spring.  I saw him once when he was in town for a wedding.  A group of all of the former college students who live in the area who knew him and learned from him gathered.  It was a sweet reunion.  He has affected us all more than he knows.  Perhaps more than even we know. 

 The pastor that married Husband and I is moving to Colorado.  The sermon that he preached at our wedding was a bunch of bull.  Well, not the Bible part, but the part about me being a little girl dreaming of my wedding day, blah blah blah.  I wasn’t that little girl.  Nevertheless, he is a good friend and we feel so blessed to have such a good friend perform our wedding.

Husband has a similar relationship to him that I have to my campus minister from college.  He learned a lot about doing ministry from him.  He counts him as a true friend, not just a pastor.  I am grateful to him, not only for the work that he has done at our church, but for the servant he has taught Husband to be.

I look forward to the trips that Husband and I will take together (hopefully no breakdowns!) to Colorado.  I want to encourage and invest in these great leaders as they have encouraged and invested in us.  I want to see their ministry now and learn how to partner with them. 

Not only that, but I want to pass on what I’ve learned about doing ministry and living in community.  I want to see stories about the high school girls from my small group reaching their friends for Christ, getting B’s instead of A’s in college because they are equally focused on ministry as they are academics, throwing off everything that hinders them and the sin that so easily entangles and running the race that is marked out for them.  I just don’t want them to move all the way to Colorado.