Can we take you out to lunch?

Hello. My name is ???. My story, in brief, is that I was raised in a very fundamentalist home in conservative ??? County, Pennsylvania, and brought up to be a good christian boy who didn't smoke, drink, or swear, and who was sure to have little contact with the heathen outside of my church walls. In early high school, I started questioning quiet a bit of my worldview, as high-schoolers often do. In tenth grade, I persuaded my parents to transfer me from my 180 person christian school to the local high school from which I would then graduate. By the time I graduated, my faith had changed into something that was still very undefined, but obviously not what it had been before. The year directly following high school, I attended Word of Life Bible Institute in New York, the bastion of fundamentalism. Maybe that was a mistake, I don't know. At any rate, when I came home that next summer, it was clear to me that I had a lot of deprogramming to do. The systematic theologies and the trite witnessing tools weren't cutting it for me, and there was an amazing tension between who I knew I was, and the God who I thought I was supposed to be following. That summer, my youth leader gave me your books More Ready Than You Realize and A New Kind of Christian. His leadership, along with those and several other books were greatly used by God to change my life. Now I am anticipating working with [this mentor] and several others in a new church plant in 2005. So, with my history out of the way, I'll move on to my reason for writing. A friend of mine named ??? is up at Word of Life right now. He just finished reading New Kind of Christian, and loved it. He called me a few days ago and said that he is planning on making a trip down to Cedar Ridge this Spring. Myself and my friend ???, who also recently read your books, are going with him. I've attached a couple of emails from them that should give a little more background. Anyway, the long and short of it is this - I know that you're an extremely busy guy, and that this request is probably nuts, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Is there any way that we would be able to buy you breakfast or lunch, and sit down and talk with you for an hour or so? It would mean the world to all three of us, but if not, that's totally cool. I'm greatly looking forward to visiting Cedar Ridge. God bless.

Just a note to say that I wish I could meet with everyone who comes to visit, but sometimes my schedule is just too full. We need to think about sponsoring “guest weekends” at Cedar Ridge at some point, so several people can visit at the same time and we can have some time together as a group. Stay tuned