Alas! For those of you who have dismayed at the absense of your favorite purveyor of discounted bananas, I have returned with a vengeance and at least renewed intentions on keeping you afresh of mental developments via this electronic forum.

In other words, I've been slacking. You might have even noticed that I lost this site altogether due to a domain name expiration that I forgot was coming. But the ship is righted now and you can continue to read the latest ramblings, plus look at stuff like the newest photo galleries. I still have some more videos on the way if Lee will ever get off his duff and get them burned off the computer in Alabama that holds them.

I have a little mini-essay to share with you but will put that into a separate entry. I may write that tonight, we'll see.

But for now I'll let you in on this. This past week (two days of working at the Tulsa International Soul Winning Workshop, and then four days of hiking and camping in Arkansas with Alabama friends) has made me all the more aware of the separate worlds I live in. Right now I have at least three separate and distinct worlds that I am maintaining, with a fourth that is beginning to develop. The first, and perhaps the least active at this point in life, is my Norman world. This consists of all of my friends and experiences from college. For the most part, I have been moving away from this world for a year and a few months now, but it is still very important to me, and the friendships I have carried away from this place are extremely important to me. Physically going back to this world is very easy and natural for me, and is a place where I was very well established. It's where much of my lasting identity was formed.

Next is my Alabama world. I was only physically present in this world for ten months, but it was so intense, in both good and bad ways, that a huge part of my identity is left there. I consider some of my best friends to be people I encountered in Alabama. Walking into the little apartment filled with them this weekend was no different than what it was like seeing them every day.

And right now I have found a world that I never expected, nor even wanted, but God has blessed me with. I came back to Tulsa in November with a good bit of mental kicking and screaming. I did not want to be here, and psychologically rebelled against the idea of establishing any kind of identity here. For a long time, I convinced myself that I was a victim of a hostage crisis, being held in a foreign place against my will until I found a way to escape. But just like he usually does, God has blessed me with people from whom I am learning a lot of powerful spiritual lessons. Don't get me wrong - I am ready to go to Abilene right now - but leaving the people God has put into my life here is going to be yet another hard thing to do.

And, of course, there is my impending Abilene world. Already I've started getting to know several of the graduate students and some of those in a local campus ministry there. I'm sure God is preparing to blow me away with the kind of experiences he is waiting to share with me there.

Now, there is nothing unusual about this kind of experience. People go from one place to the next all the time. But what I am finding is that there really is a common thread to each of these worlds - and that is the encountering of people in each that are teaching me incredible lessons about God. I think that it is because of that commonality that I am able to transition from one to the next so easily. On Saturday morning at 1:30am I finished helping the Memorial Drive campus ministry minister to a hundred college students at a huge bonfire, and in a matter of five hours was in a totally different state with totally different people, but having essentially the same experience. So, what I know now is that it truly does not matter where you are or when you are there. Wherever you are, whenever you are there, God has created that world especially for you, to teach you incredible things. And the next world you are in, whenever you are there and for whatever reason, God is going to do the same thing. Awesome!