Craig Nash: Days 3.9 through Day 4

Since my friends Tony and Melissa have been married they have said a prayer that their home be one where people feel relaxed. And their prayer has been answered. When you enter their house, wherever they have chosen to live, it feels as if you have entered a refuge.

Such is the case with Blake and Karla. I'm not sure if they've ever actually prayed that prayer, but the feeling is the same. They are deliberate about being deliberate with their space. And it is a blessing every time you enter their space.

Blake is everything I am not in this area. At the end of the day my first reaction is to empty my pockets and let the trash contained therein fall wherever the wind (or the artifical air created by electricity) takes it. I don't treat space with reverence. Blake does.

And this is where it is difficult being descriptive about our time in San Marcos with Blake and Karla. How do you describe serenity without being melodramatic? That's a task for writers much more gifted than me.

We arrived on Saturday night. Blake and Karla had just spent a day in Austin with their youth group. After a dinner at Outback we went to their apartment and sat down. We talked. We watched an episode or two of friends, then we went to sleep- me on the couch, Jason upstairs.

When we woke up it was Sunday morning, an important morning for a minister of the Christian faith. It was silently agreed upon (and possibly verbally hinted at) that Jason and I would not be worshipping in the conventional sense on our trip. But Blake couldn't bow out, since he is the youth minister. He did, however, give his wife permission (as if she needed it) to stay at home with us.

And here is what the day looked like: I sat on the couch and read, as did Jason. Sometime along the way, about midmorning, I went upstairs to take a nap. I then went down and found Jason and Karla in conversation. I laid down on the couch and read some more. It was around noon and we were all still in our sleeping clothes. Blake came home-- walked straight from the door to upstairs and came back down in his sleeping clothes. His change took a total of 32.8 seconds. It was literally a thing of determination.

Then we lounged and talked and napped and read and did everything over again.

Later in the evening while Blake and Karla were at church, Jason and I had dinner at a place on the river. There were families out on the water, as if there sense of belonging to the world depended on it. Beer was consumed, the sun made it's trip down, and for the first time I realized the knot that was in my shoulder at the beginning of the trip had disappeared.

We headed to a Starbucks, read some, then went back through the lounge, converse, read cycle at the apartment....

Day five coming up...