(Page 2 of 9) - When something like this happens it is inevitable that you scroll back, as I did that morning, to the day that David and I had first met. I remembered meeting David one happy morning about two years before, at seven a.m. in the loud and hearty crowd at Jim Lane’s house in New Canaan, Connecticut. Jim Lane was a former partner at Goldman Sachs and every Friday now for the last nine years we have had our Men’s Fellowship/Bible Study at Jim’s house in New Canaan. It had started out in 1995 as a tiny group of men, mostly Wall Street financial types; but over the years the group had grown and grown until now it was extremely large, almost comically so. At least it was comic to me; there were now about 150 men crowding into Jim’s house every Friday morning, talking loudly and intensely, as though they had already been up for hours. This ragtag men’s biblestudy had gotten so big that we now even had an official sounding name: the New Canaan Society. Just a few years before it had been a group of eight or ten of us with me leading them through the Gospel of John. Now we were a veritable throng that swelled giddily past Jim’s vast livingroom, spilling into his dining room and foyer; there was even a group in his library watching on closed circuit tv! And we had as our speakers internationally known evangelical superstars like Chuck Colson, Jack Hayford, Reinhard Bonnke, Luis Palau and Bruce Wilkinson. The whole affair had somehow become an undeniable phenomenon.
Every week more folks from New York and Connecticut were visiting to see what all the hoo-ha was about, and practically everyone in upscale New Canaan wondered what on earth was going on up there in that house on the hill so early every Friday morning, with cars parked a half mile down the road. For all we knew they probably thought we were some sort of strange cult of BMW owners.
What was going on was as much like an A.A. meeting as anything else: men from many many miles around had heard there was a place you could come and be with other men who wouldn’t judge you, but who knew we all had problems and that in order to deal with our problems we needed each other and we needed God. We’d meet almost every Friday and hear a speaker and sing a couple of songs and talk furiously with each other and then head off to work, recharged for another week. Our simple thesis was that men didn’t make friendships as easily as women did, and that when things got tough at home or in your career, you needed friends to carry the load with you, to be there for you. You needed friends who would help you make the right decisions when the temptation to make the wrong one was stronger than ever. And so we had simply gotten together in that spirit, week after week after week, until things were so out of hand we literally needed a traffic cop in the front of Jim’s house.
So it was on one of those mornings that I met David; I hadn’t had my coffee yet and dozens of friends were hailing me and buttonholing me and in the midst of the friendly melee I bumped into him; he looked awfully familiar, but I couldn’t exactly place him, certainly not without benefit of caffeine. “David Bloom, NBC,” he said, brightly and helpfully. “Right!” I said, “I thought you looked familiar!”
David told me he had been invited by a friend of his, but I didn’t even know the friend’s name; that’s how big this group had gotten. I used to know every single person. David seemed comfortable, even to be enjoying himself, and it didn’t take long for him to see that as serious as most of the men were about their faith, this was certainly not a pious bunch. Our laughter was raucous and frequent -- sometimes too much so. We didn’t take ourselves very seriously, but we took God seriously.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page › |
