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11:14 AM Atlanta airport

We are almost but not quite home. Right now we are sitting at Gate D27 waiting for the flight to Columbus, MS where we will pick up our car and drive to Tupelo. The flight has been delayed but not by much so if all goes well, we should be home by mid-afternoon. That brings to an end my longest ministry trip of the year. I started three weeks ago in Columbus, flew to Grand Rapids, then to Portland, then to Allentown, and now we are almost back where we started. In between I spent a week at Maranatha in MI, a week at Cannon Beach in OR, and a week at Pinebrook in PA. I preached 29 times, or maybe 31. I lost count along the way.

Traveling the conference circuit has its advantages. You get to meet people from many different churches, including some people you’ve met before. This time I made lots of new friends. I gave away hundreds of Keep Believing refrigerator magnets and signed up 150 new people for the sermon email list. I am grateful to Tim Ostrander, Terry Agal, Janet Kerns, Jeff Carlsen, and Dan and Vonnie Allen for a great many kindnesses along the way. And I am thankful to the musicians who prepared the hearts of the people to hear the Word. Plus I am grateful for wireless Internet (always important) and for people who checked on me to see how I was doing day by day.

And I was very glad (more than I can say) when Marlene got on the same shuttle bus I was riding at the Cincinnati airport.

Starting two days ago I got very excited about going home. And last night before I preached, Marlene said, “One more message and you’re done.” I had already been thinking about that.

It turns out that our time at home will be short because this is the weekend that Mark and Vanessa and Josh and Leah move to Dallas. Tomorrow we help them load the U-Haul (Nick is coming over to help out), on Sunday we’re driving with them to Dallas, on Monday we’ll help them unload, and on Tuesday we’ll drive back to Tupelo.

I told a friend that “life is crazy.” “Yes, it is,” he replied.

On that happy note, we’re waiting to board for the final flight of this long trip.

I’m writing this note from the Memphis airport. After traveling over 4500 miles today, we are now only 85 miles from home. We started 19 hours ago in Prague. It occurred to me as we checked in that they probably don’t get many travelers checking their bags from Prague to Tupelo. We flew from Prague to Amsterdam and then on to Memphis where we are awaiting the final flight to Tupelo. Everything was per usual except that we went through three security checkpoints–once in Prague, a stricter one in Amsterdam, and another one in Memphis when we passed through US Customs. On the nine-hour flight from Amsterdam, I watched two movies (The Bucket List and Juno) and listened to two sermons by S. Lewis Johnson, a lecture by Al Mohler on the New Atheism, a sermon on Psalm 23 by Haddon Robinson, and most of a sermon on Samson by another preacher whose name I never figured out. Marlene said she watched three movies as we crossed the Atlantic.