Tour of Friends

A week ago my college roommate, Sallie, came down to visit us from Connecticut. She and I were roommates three years at Harding and best friends. She and I truly made the most of our college experience and loved every second of it! We were blessed with incredible Christian friends and an experience that I think could rival the best of them. We were queens for the Knight's Social Club together and threw a mean end of the year party at Heber each May with a cookout, swimming, and a devotional to end each school year with around 150 friends. We were quite social during our college time, but we also grew spiritually as well as Harding was definitely a place where my faith was cemented and grew real. For Sallie's graduation present, I wrote her a book about our college career, The Sallie and Amy Story. It's about 100 pages long…one of these days I'm going to get it bound for real.

Anyway, Sal nows lives in Connecticut and has been teaching in New York since college. She recently got her Master's from Columbia in teaching visually impaired students and works at a public school in the Bronx. We obviously don't see each other very often so last week was a treasured time. Our idea was to take a little road trip and visit other friends that live nearby to have a little reunion. It also gave us lots of driving time to catch up, and her a chance to get to know Jake and Grace.

It was a breath of fresh air to see several old friends. It was so fun to see everyone's kids and let all of our kids meet. We have some friends that our missionaries, and three of our friends just got back from or are going on mission trips soon. It was so wonderful to see how God is working and how He took our little Harding group and literally sent them out all over the world. We're having a reunion at Harding this year for homecoming, and I can't wait!

Here our some highlights from our "tour of friends:"

Chris and Jill Shelby's kids, Jeremy and Dijana's kids, and Jake and Grace:

The Shelby's were in Houston that week so we had them over for breakfast along with Misty Mathews and her four kids. It was so great to catch up with the Shelby's! Chris and Jill are missionaries in Rwanda and Jeremy and Dijana live in Searcy where Jeremy is the youth minister for Downtown church. We just picked up where we left off 5-7 years ago and had a wonderful morning together!

Sal wanted good Tex-Mex so we took her to Chuy's…yum!

One of my favorites of Grace:

We went to Dallas for a few days and stayed at Randi Roper Perkins' parents' house with Randi and her three kids and a short cameo appearance from Shannon! Her parents were out of town and they graciously let us use their house which has an incredible pool! We spent a lot of time outside, needless to say. We stayed up late after the kids went to bed talking by the pool and praying together…Yea for good girl time!

Randi's three (Brady, Braxton, and Bryce) with Jake and Grace

Randi, Sal, and me

Jake was incognito most of the trip…this came out of kid's meal at Wendy's…best kid's meal prize EVER!

We got to go see Tim and Amanda Allen and their two, Reagan and Bennett. Bennett is 4 months old and had heart surgery a few weeks ago. He did wonderfully! He joined Jake in the "cool scar" club! He was born with Tetrology of Fallot, but this surgery was so successful, the doctors don't anticipate him having anymore. In this picture, Jake was trying to lift up his shirt to show off his scar. Their little Reagan is so adorable too!

And then we got to see Adam and Rebekah Mathews and meet their sweet Lily. We met them in Shreveport and walked around the boardwalk and had lunch. Adam is spearheading the reunion in November so we brainstormed about that. Lily and Grace are close in age so we told them they'll be friends at Harding one day!

Sal, Adam, and Rebekah

We had a wonderful week full of old friends, lots of laughs, many tears from my two from all of the riding in the car, and lots of good food! Sal is the baker extraordinaire and made us cupcakes, brownies, and an amazing chocolate cake. That's one good thing about us living thousands of miles apart…I would weigh 800 pounds if we lived in the same city :) Ty was really great to share us for the week, too. He had to stay home and work, but hung out with Sallie a few nights as well.

Here's to GREAT FRIENDS!