I went out with the Daybreak Quartet this weekend. We were in Palm Bay, FL on Saturday and Sunday and at Trinity Baptist Church (and college) in Jacksonville, FL last night.
The two concerts in Palm Bay were special to me because they turned out being a blast from my past. In college during the early 1990's, I travelled for the school in a male quartet playing for them. The leader of the group was Dave Young, who is now a very in-demand evangelist. This weekend, we were reunited because he was preaching the revival meetings we did a concert for.
I did not realize how much I would enjoy being with Dave again, mostly because it just felt like old times. I was struck by the reality that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dave is even more polished now but definitely has the same style of preaching. I could close my eyes and imagine being out on the road with him about 18 years ago.
After the concert, we went out to eat and laughed for hours about things that happened during that summer. I have to admit I made a lot of mistakes that summer. We played pratical jokes on Dave every chance we could but I will not go into them here.
But we especially talked about two stories from that summer that we will never forget.
The first story happened in a church. During a service one night, the piano bench was very close to the edge of the stage stairs and while playing, the back legs worked their way over the edge. In the middle of a song, all of a sudden, I felt the bench fall out from under me and start clattering slowly down the stairs until it crashed on the floor. I stood up quickly and actually tried to keep playing, but the audience was just laughing themselves sick. We all laughed for a few minutes and then started the song again where we had stopped.
The second story was not so funny. We were on tour but had a few days of rest at a camp. One day, we hiked to a waterfall. The water was high and the current was moving pretty swiftly, but we were still dumb enough to start playing in the stream at the top of the waterfall. All of a sudden, I lost my balance and started getting swept toward the edge of the waterfall.
I remember clawing at rocks and plants growing at the bottom of the stream, but could not stop. A few seconds later, I went over. It was one of those waterfalls that does not fall straight down but sort of cascades for about 70 feet. As I fell, I bounced off rocks. Amazingly, when I was at the bottom, I was scraped and bruised but still conscious. The only thing that saved me (besides the providence of God) was that I went over feet first.
It was a lot of fun retelling those stories but the best thing about the weekend was seeing Dave at work doing what he always wanted to do--being an evangelist. And I am sure that he had similar thoughts about me. Back in those days, I never would of dreamed that almost 20 years later, we would be working together again in a revival. God is good.
