By April Terry

My work took me to Palm Springs about a week ago for a conference there, and I spent three days with about one hundred people I’ve never met before.

Of those hundred, I knew only about three of them. Suffice to say that I was thrown out of my comfort zone yet again, but I learned a lot of interesting things about people while I was there.

I learned that you have to say it first. I could go into the lobby and sit right next to someone and if I didn’t say anything, we would sit there in silence. However, if I said even the slightest comment, even just about the weather, I could easily start up a conversation with someone I never met. This fact, went both ways throughout the weekend. I found that as a I got more and more tired toward the end of the conference, I also wanted to make less effort in connecting with others.

Read the rest of this entry »

I wasn’t sure how this day would go, frankly. My old friend (and former Young Life club kid from the earliest days of my staff career) Vince Staub had asked me to bring the DE Seminar to his church in San Jose. It’s a smaller church (Cornerstone Community Church), but they thought maybe they could get a couple of other churches to join in on the expense of bringing the Seminar to their town. No such luck. I decided to fly to San Jose and do the gig for whoever showed up.

We had 27 people come today…all but two were from Cornerstone (one of the outsiders was my friend Pam Marino from Sunnyvale Presbyterian). They were a diverse group age-wise (and otherwise), but they seemed to be totally engaged with me all day. I don’t think we lost anyone during the event except a couple of moms who needed to go pick up or deliver a child to a sporting event of some kind…which is pretty much the story of life in the Silicon Valley these days. I was very happy to be with them, and I felt very welcomed.

We had just one “lost” person show up for the interview (we shoot for three, usually), but he was great. Josh was married to a woman who was a Christ follower, but he himself had a Jewish background (he quit going to synagogue after his bar-mitzvah). He attended Cornerstone almost every week with his wife and two children, which is statistically more often that most Christians attend church. He likes it. He likes the people there. He is not a Christian and is not currently interested in becoming one, but he feels like he belongs at Cornerstone Church. I thought that was really cool. He wishes people there would ask him more about his journey, but he genuinely loves being part of that community. He just doesn’t do the Jesus thing. Yet. Thanks, Josh, for being such a great help to us. You probably said more that will be remembered in that 30 minute segment than I did the entire day.

I got to spend Friday afternoon with senior pastor, Craig Selness. He took me to his favorite restaurant for lunch (Arby’s) because he meets there weekly with someone who he helped move from atheism to Jesus follower, and I got to join in their ongoing conversation. Craig gets what it means to listen people into the Kingdom of God. It was fun to watch him do his thing, and to meet his dear friend and brother in Christ, who now spends his vacation times smuggling Bibles into communist and Muslim lands.

I have a feeling I’ll be heading back to San Jose in the next year. My friend Vince thinks the rest of San Jose needs to hear this stuff, and now that there are a few more folks who have joined the DE family there, he thinks he might have a better chance of getting other churches to join in. We’ll see. But I can tell you right now that I was honored to be a part of what God is doing in San Jose through Craig, Vince and the rest of the wonderful family of Cornerstone Community Church this weekend. I really hope we get to party again sometime soon.

Thank you, Craig, Vince and Kathleen, for your love and hospitality. We’ll be in touch.

by Ian Siever

Over the last few months I’ve been taking the bus wherever I go. In that time I have met many interesting people and overheard some interesting conversations. For example, there was this lady who drives the late night bus out front of Wild Island (where I work) on Wednesdays and Thursdays. For many weeks she would be the one picking me up after work. After about a week or so of riding her bus, this lady began having conversations with me like we might have been family friends. I found out she lives up near Tahoe and has three children. I loved chatting with her. What makes this special to me is the fact that, even though I already knew about it, it showed me how much people long to have connections with other human beings. To talk and to be heard.

Yesterday I saw another woman I usually see. I was almost going to be late for the bus (I even had to run) but the driver was kind enough to wait for me a second or two (which doesn’t happen often), so I barely made it. I get on the bus and there was this woman passenger already seated. She says to me, “Almost missed it.” I replied, “Almost, but thankfully the driver waited.” Now, I knew I had seen her before on the bus but I didn’t know how often. So she looks up at me and says, “Did you do something different with your hair?” For a brief moment I thought, what the heck, I don’t even know this woman and she’s asking me about my hair (I had just gotten my long hair cut short that week). So I formulated an answer, “Yes I did.”

“Well, it looks good on you, very handsome.” I told her thank you and took my seat. As I sat there I pondered who this woman was to remember anything about me? Why would she remember me let alone my hair? I have a feeling it’s Gods way to let us know that, no matter what, He’s always thinking about us. Sometimes the act of one person that you don’t even know can be the sign that tells you so.

After we stopped talking, I found myself thinking about her. I wondered little things about her, who she was, why is she taking the bus, only to realize that this one random person had had an effect on my heart.

No matter your age or how smart you are or how you look, if you take the time to listen to others and observe them, there’s a lot to learn. And more times than not, you start to fill a relational void in someone elses’ life while filling the one in your own.