When I wandered into First Baptist Church, Murphy, TX, I didn’t meet Michelle or Jason Kearney. I didn’t meet them even the second or third time I visited. I’m tempted to say that I didn’t meet Michelle until about six weeks into my time at the Murph, and even then, we didn’t actually have a conversation until we moved to the Prov, I don’t think. It wasn’t because Michelle or Jason were too involved in themselves or their own cliques, but rather because they were both serving in less visible capacities.
My friendship with Michelle was not fast. Don’t misunderstand me– it wasn’t that we had disagreements, or didn’t care for one another. For once, I didn’t throw myself into a one-sided relationship, and Michelle was her usual somewhat cautious self. Our friendship grew out of a mutual longing to have community and by the grace of the Father, I was blessed enough to get to claim her.
She is meticulous and thoughtful, and incredibly insightful and creative: all things that I am not. While I am busy running off at the mouth and taking leaps off of cliffs, she quietly contemplates before speaking and calculates before taking a walk near the edge. Don’t misunderstand me: she is a passionate woman– but she has more restraint than I. Sometimes, I’m envious of that restraint. She gets into FAR less trouble than me!
She has taught me these things and more… her sweet thoughtfulness and southern charm make me want to be a better woman, who embraces her feminine rolls more gracefully. I am so thankful to call her friend.
Things That Remind Me of Michelle:
- “Tonight, Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins
- Dave Matthews Band
- Gilmore Girls
- Abstract art
- “Arse”
- Wicker
- French-style fabric patterns
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- Toothless loud men with their louder wives in grocery stores
I met Luke for the first time my sophomore year in high school. He was a senior, and in band with me. One night during Summer band, while I was spending the night with my friend Brandy, he kidnapped us, as was tradition. We were in our pajamas, in the dead of sleep, and in comes Luke (and others) to blindfold us and drive us to an unknown location. Thankfully, Luke was one of the nice seniors. Some of my friends were made to sit in the back of a truck that went through a carwash, and to play their instruments in Walmart at 4:30am. We just went to breakfast. I clearly remember the ride to the restaurant- Denny’s- because he had the same song on repeat the entire trip: Ants Marching by the Dave Matthews Band.
Luke was also very good friends with Jason, so I knew of him quite a bit. Much like Keely, Luke and I didn’t really know one another well in high school. It was with much thanks (or disdain on his part, maybe) that MySpace reintroduced us. Or wait… Permian.net? I don’t know. Somehow on the internet. We’d conversed quite a bit, and finally, our schedules matched up to where he was able to come out my St. Patrick’s Day party this year, and then my birthday party later in April.
I met Keely McMinn when I was 15. I was a sophomore and she was a junior at Permian. I’m not quite clear on the details of our meeting, but I know that she was intoxicated, and it was a Friday night after a football game. We saw one another on and off throughout that school year, at various parties and gatherings, but didn’t really get to know one another until the next year when she was dating a friend of mine. He shall remain nameless to protect the sticky-lipped.
Interestingly enough, Keely and I became friends again only about a year ago, after not even so much as hearing from one another since she graduated from high school in 1997. We came across one another on MySpace, and found that we really enjoyed one another.
In 2001, I began doing work for a concert promoter in San Antonio: Greg Carnes. It was at the first concert I did with him that I met Katie, a shy high school senior who seemed just as baffled by the whole thing as I did. We were paired together that night, and survived. It really wasn’t until several weeks later that we actually became friends, though. She walked into a local cafe where I was seeing my good friend Chris Taylor play, and we sat together. I don’t know that we really spent much time apart that entire summer. Katie left for Texas A&M that fall, but that certainly didn’t deter our friendship. Between back-and-forth road trips between College Station and San Antonio and weekend phone calls to say, “You’re here aren’t you?!” we managed to become closer and closer.
Despite some VERY difficult times in our friendship, including nearly a year where we did not speak, I know that I can depend on her for anything and everything. She knows me better than anyone else, and I probably know her better than anyone else. We are the best of friends. While it is wonderful to be known, it is also incredibly sanctifying to not be able to easily hide from someone. She knows when I’m hiding, and likewise I her. We’re able to celebrate one another’s successes, no matter how small, and mourn one another’s losses, no matter how major. I am blessed to call her friend.
When I returned to San Antonio from Lubbock in 2004, I began searching for a church home. I looked around for quite a while before I finally decided to visit Redeemer Presbyterian. I was immediately contacted by Justin, an associate pastor at the time, and he took me out to lunch the next week. We sat together in this Mexican food restaurant over my lunch break and talked about music and God, and more than anything else– church. Justin told me later that he thought he’d never see me again after that first meeting. I guess I was a bit freaked out at the prospect of not being “Baptist” anymore. I’d honestly never been exposed to any other denomination on a real level, and I didn’t know what to expect. I did return, though, and through the love and inclusion that Justin and his gorgeous wife, Elizabeth showed me, I found a home.
My baby brother started taking up space when I was four. When we were kids, we always shared a bedroom– on bunkbeds of course– me on the top, and he on the bottom. Every night I would sneak into my parents’ bed at around 1 or 2: am. Thinking that it would keep me from crowding his slumber, my dad guilted me. “What if there were a fire, Stephanie? What would John do? He wouldn’t know to break the window.” Naturally, this broke my heart. As much as he infuriated me by pulling my Barbies’ heads off and trying to flush them down the toilet, I wouldn’t know what life would be without my little brother. Much to my dad’s chagrin, my nightly routine didn’t stop. Instead, I would jump down from my bunk, wake my brother enough to get him to follow me through the house and down the hall, and together, we’d find a sufficient place to snuggle and finish the night.
Now that silly little kid is a man. Yes, the kid who LOVED to sit and play ‘Ninja Turtles’ in the toilet is a fireman and a sheriff’s deputy in the panhandle. He lives on his own, pays his own bills. He is a man. I will never forget the time he spent at boot camp, not long after September 11th. Eager to serve his country, this child of 17 years packed up and went with his division to Georgia where he wrote letters of both pride and brokenness. It was here, then, that he became this man.
When I met Jessica in 2003, she was quiet, sarcastic, and trying to come off drugs. She’d just quit college and moved back to San Antonio to live with her aunt who just happened to attend my church. She gave me the best Christmas gift I’ve ever received to date: a mix tape of live John Mayer music at a time that I was completely obsessed. I moved to Lubbock only a few weeks later.
I have been very fortunate to have found a church like mine. And very fortunate to have found a pastor with a sense of humor, who has a wife with a sense of fun and femininity. And maybe fortunate most of all to have found four of the greatest kid’s kids ever.
It is so strange/funny/awesome the way that God has used a message board in my life. I met George (aka Horhay) on the Webboard in early 2006. He responded to my lament about the freakish churches that I’d been visiting in the Dallas area, and graciously invited this “internet weirdo” to visit his church. The first week I visited, he wasn’t there (there is comedy in that), but I never visited another church after that. I’d found my home.
