March 17 – “Oooold friends”

Boy did we ever have a great treat yesterday afternoon.  We were visited by some old and very dear friends from our days in Denver, Colorado, Mike and Olivia Wilson.  Olivia and I spent at least two weeks together every summer we lived in Colorado … OK, have you thought about that one for a few seconds?  Actually she and I were usually the only adults who could always go as sponsors to youth camp and mission trips.  Mike is now a professor at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth.  He was finishing up preaching an old-fashioned revival meeting at a little church in Louisiana, so they decided to take the southern route back to Fort Worth. 

And that southern route just happens to take them right through beautiful Galveston Island.  We met up with them at Nick’s (that place on the seawall that uses Gaido’s kitchen and serves the same food as Gaido’s but charges a little less and doesn’t use cloth tablecloths).  I had fried shrimp and crab cakes.  The shrimp was OK, but they left the crab cakes in the deep fryer a little too long.  Not that they were inedible by any means.  I managed to force myself to enjoy them anyway.  OK.  They were actually pretty good.  But the great company made everything taste just a little better.  And they even joined us at the house for a cup of coffee after we ate.  Nick was probably happy to see us go.  Lots of laughter.

Cailyn was with us, too, and I think she would agree that Mike and Olivia are pretty fun folks to be around.  In fact, when I took her to softball practice, she was ecstatic when there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere near any of the fields.  That meant she could go back home and hang out with “our friends.”  We did our best to talk them into spending the night with us, but they had been away from their own bed for five nights.  And in Mike’s words, “when you get a certain age, you know, your own bed has a certain appeal.”  They did stick around until after six so they could miss the bulk of the Houston traffic.  I think they have made another friend for life in Cailyn.  She even reminded me to pray for them last night at family worship time.

1 Timothy 6:6-7 says, “But godliness with contentment is great gain.  For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.”

Father, thank you for the chance to catch up with Mike and Olivia.  Help them to be happy.  Amen.