Back to the Fray

I'm recovering pretty well from last week's trip to the hospital. I spent most of last week on the couch or asleep and have still been feeling a bit sluggish the last few days. I go see the doc for a follow up in the morning and will hopefully receive a clean bill of health.

Saturday we hit LifeLight for a bit. LifeLight is a huge Christian music festival in Sioux Falls that reportedly had over 300,000 in attendance over the weekend. I admit coming into it with a bias. My only other large, outdoor Christian event was Passion's OneDay event in 2000 which was a life altering, intense, dedicated time of worship, prayer and word. This was Christian entertainment and I found myself wishing that there was more depth to what I witnessed.

Granted, I only went for about five hours on Saturday afternoon and had to miss several of the artists that I would have probably resonated with and where the crowds were certainly larger and more engaged. I also was dragging like crazy and probably wasn't in the right frame of mind. We saw Desperation Band (which was okay), Angel Dean (who one of our guitar players plays for), Derek Webb (who was his usual prophetic, fabulous self) and heard from Craig Gross, founder of XXXchurch.com (which was excellent). Each set was only about 25-30 minutes in length, which made the five hours seem even longer. We'll see how compelling next year looks before determining whether we'll venture back or not.

The last two days have been spent at cold weather university for the store where we get to listen to industry reps from companies like The North Face, Mountain Hardware and Columbia talk about their products and technologies for hours on end. It's been good info and I've picked up a few cool things (swag) and great deals on some coats (which I desperately need). My last day is tomorrow before I finally get to go back to work at the store on Friday. It will be good to get back to a routine that resembles normal.