Nashville:.
I arrived yesterday (Thurs) and took it fairly easy. I had a lot of work to do for a church, which I finished this morning.
Last night I got to see Alex, Sarah and David.

This morning I met with my new friend Al Andrews. Al leads a ministry called The Porter's Call.

It's a ministry to professional artist, started by a non-profit organization associated with Sparrow Records several years ago.

Then I ran into Mike King and was introduced to his wife Vicki and their daughter. Upon saying goodbye to Mike I ran into Lilly Lewin, who I don't think I'd ever met before. Though it seems we have mutual friends across the Northern US. We'll chat later.

Lilly and I stepped into the first general session together and watched Tic and Marko and Karla give what I call "the rules" .

A few things entered my mind as I sat there.
First. This is the first time Yac didn't give this presentation whether it be in person or via video in some time. Marko, Tic and Carla did a great job by the way.

I was remembering Yac. Listening to "the rules" looking at this amazing set up and felt awe.
I can't put words to what I felt. Words like: normal and right don't fit. "moving on" doesn't capture it either.

Remembering is closer.

Fredrich Buechner put it this way.

"How do they live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because even death can never put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Whereever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they live still in us. Memory is more than looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill, taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us - and through them we come to understand ourselves - in new ways too. Who knows what "the communion of saints" means, but surely it means mroe than justthat we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knoew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us."