Lunch with the dawgs

The closer to Christmas we get, the busier I am and the harder it is to post anything of substance. Today, rather than post nothing at all (as I did Tuesday), I'm going to write one of those insipid "Where I Am Now" posts.

Forget about getting normal office work done this week. Today is the one opportunity I will have all week to answer mail and deal with whatever is urgent in my e-mail or on my "to do" list.

Yesterday we had a luncheon for about 150 volunteers who serve weekly at Grace to You. The annual Grace to You Staff Christmas activity (at Disneyland) is tomorrow, and the GraceLife Christmas get-together is Saturday night. On Sunday afternoon Darlene and I will leave for a week of vacation. (I must use one more week of accrued vacation by the end of the calendar year or lose it.) So I'll be blogging next week from the east coast—and probably somewhat sporadically.

I still intend to get back to the thread I started about private revelation, but I can't do it right now.

Tuesday was an interesting day. Among other things, I finally got to meet two of the Fide-o guys, Scott and Jason.

It may surprise a lot of readers to hear that I did not know the Fide-o Dawgs before Tuesday. A few people have practically blamed me for them, as if I stirred them up and unleashed them on the blogosphere. Not so. I wish I could take credit for that, but it wasn't my doing.

They are a couple of Southern Baptist pastors who are involved in a church-planting ministry about an hour and a half from where I live. Although we have nearly always agreed on controversial issues, we never actually met before Tuesday. (No, wait. Jason said I met him at a Shepherds' conference once. But I don't remember it.) They have a mostly-silent blogging partner, Bret Capranica, who married my secretary a few years ago when he was fresh out of seminary. He's probably the least mischievous of the three. But I don't even know Bret very well, and he didn't come with Jason and Scott on this trip.

Anyway, Jason and Scott had e-mailed me last week to say they would be in my area and wanted me to go lunch with them. Having never met them, I wasn't quite sure how to picture them. It was hard to resist the mental picture of a couple of tattooed miscreants in motorcycle leather.

Turns out, they are winsome and amiable—the kind of guys you'd love to spend the day fishing with. They're both from the deep south, funny, fun-loving, effervescent, and interesting. The story of the church they are planting is fascinating. I hope they blog about it one of these days.

Anyway, they both had salads, no red meat. No barbecue pork. We talked about Psalm 22 and the doctrine of penal substitution. (Jason answered well the questions I had raised about his controversial post on that subject.) We compared blogwar wounds. They told me what they really think about Frank Turk. We agreed that homeschool moms are probably the next generation's best hope. And we talked about the kind of stuff pastors always talk about over lunch. The time went too quickly. I hope we get to do it again.

But not today. Today I have two 10-inch stacks of paperwork I have to get through.

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