What I did on my vacation.

I am, at the moment, officially behind on everything because I spent the better part of last week on one of the longest actual vacations of my adult life in NYC. Here are the highlights:



1) Seeing friends. I was in NYC for an annual reunion of some of my amazing seminary friends, with whom I participated in an informal Bible study for the duration of my time at Yale Div School. The study was the brain-child of my wonderful friend Mindy, who also does most of the work of getting us back together every year. Mindy and this group are living proof that a huge part of ministry is hospitality: simply inviting people to come together and giving them space to build real relationships.

While in NYC, my women's group friends and I had many chances to catch up with other friends. The photo above is a totally candid shot of me sitting down for a beer with my best friend from YDS, Matt. At this point, we had been reunited for all of 30 seconds and were already deep in conversation about something (probably "Lost"). That's the sign of a great friendship.

2) Seeing friends achieve their dreams. While in NYC, I also had the chance to catch up with two friends whose careers I have been following obsessively online for the past year. I was able to attend the launch party for my childhood friend Kate Milford's phenomenal young adult novel, The Boneshaker (http://amzn.com/0547241879). I've known Kate since we were both kids in Sunday School. She's 3 years older than me, and I always looked up to her, in part because she's just a cool person and in part because I always wanted to be a writer and she was a writer. Based on the things she wrote in middle and high school, I always expected her to be a huge success. Judging from the slew of glowing reviews for this book, I think that my prediction is soon to come true. The icing on the cake is that the book is AMAZING. I expected it to be good, but it far exceeds my wildest expectations. Read it for yourself and then thank me.

I also saw my friend Emily Scott, who has founded a house church called St. Lydia's (http://www.stlydias.org/Welcome.html). Like Mindy, Emily is the epitome of hospitality in ministry and she has created a wacky, wonderful experiment in dinner-party-as-church. Emily writes an excellent blog (http://sitandeat.typepad.com/blog/) aimed at "those who think they might believe in God and aren't quite sure what to do about it." That pretty much sums up the audience for her church as well. This is a tough demographic to reach, and Emily is managing to do it without being overly pushy or proselytizing. Emily comes from a pretty artsy background, and she has taken an artist's leap of faith, quitting a really solid day job to devote more energy to this project. I really admire both her work and her nerve.

3) Running in new and exotic locales. I spent the first night of my trip in Irvington, a breathtakingly beautiful little town just outside NYC where my friend Nora is pastoring an equally beautiful Episcopal church. On the first morning of my trip, Nora directed me to a resevoir, where I got to run through the scenery along with the local early risers and then cut into town to find fresh bagels to bring home for my friends. On the second morning of my trip, I ran from one end of Central Park to the other. This was the polar opposite of the Irvington run in that there were more runners in the park then I've seen in some medium-sized races. Still a great experience, though. The sheer number of runners lent some race-day adrenaline to an otherwise ordinary Saturday morning run. Also, the amazing thing about Central Park is that you can be running along the resevoir with 10,000 other people on minute, and then take a turn off the main road and be totally alone the next.

Besides the new and exciting scenery, the great thing about running on vacation was that it gave me a little alone-time, which is something I definitely need. In the past, I've always used vacations as an excuse to slack off from exercise and this trip showed me how misguided that was. Having even those few hours by myself made me much more able to enjoy everyone's company the rest of the trip.

All in all, a great vacation. I heart NY.