USA Tour: Day Five

A day of shopping, reading, rehearsal, stories, prayer and video editing!

Our first full day in Charleston, SC. We started the day at a civilized 9am for breakfast – which had some pretty weird stuff on offer. I’ll get a photo tomorrow and upload it to the blog if they have the same things, there was some kind of mad looking round pizza-type thing and a weird looking bright yellow circular omelette kind of thing. Dave had both I avoided both and kept to the cereals and yoghurt, although here I guess I had a yo-gurt. We didn’t want a busy busy day so we thought a little amble round the mall for a couple of hours would do us fine then some lunch. The mall was a lazy mall and wasn’t even open at 10am when we rolled up. The sign said it opened at 10 but they weren’t in a rush to let us in to shop. We split up once in the mall and picked a great rendezvous location; the Wholly Cow!! I managed to get a cool new small Bible – a brown leather pocket edition of The Message from a pretty sober Christian Bookshop – although there was a lot of glory around the Bible section itself; I was pretty jacked up browsing through those. There was a crazy looking book that I didn’t get. I’ve attached a photo of the cover – I hope it’s a tongue in cheek humorous book otherwise this is pretty dodgy stuff; especially the absolute ‘guarantee’ written on the back of the dust jacket that it’ll work! We all had a successful trip and met up for a Wholly Cow coffee at 11:30 and then went out to an all-you-can-eat Chinese diner and paid the pricy sum of $26 for all three of us to stuff our faces. That’s £5.77 each including free top up cokes!

I spent the afternoon reading and then Godfrey and I went out at 5pm with his lovely shiny chrome reconditioned mini 16” Ludwig kick drum (a converted floor tom that he bought for the same price as renting a worse sounding one!) to Abundant Life Church’s building. We moved the drum kit out of its Perspex box onto the floor in front of the stage and got Godfrey’s kick and amp set up next to it. Trey, the bass player, and Paul on keyboard were on the stage behind the drum kit. We didn’t want to be on the stage – we want an intimate, immediate connection with the crowd. Paul and Trey picked up the songs quickly, Paul has played a lot of them before anyway at Abundant Life and Trey seemed to be able to follow where Godfrey was going pretty easily and I think we’ll all get on great making the sound that’s needed here. We had a lot of songs to get through so we have a decent set we’re comfortable to draw on as is needed and we didn’t finish until well after 7pm.

Godfrey and I went to pick up Dave who was feeling rather neglected (Ahhhhhh, poor baby boy). He’d been wrestling with iMovie on his MacBook trying to get an edit together of a video diary he’d recorded in the car but it wasn’t as easy for a beginner as he’d hoped. He nailed it after our evening meal though, but that’s getting ahead of myself, so let’s get back to picking up Davey. Godfrey was pretty tired after the rehearsal so we thought somewhere within walking distance would be best and next door to the hotel was a Sushi Restaurant but they were so slow coming to the table to even get the drinks order we beat a hasty retreat to the car and drove just down the main road a mile or so to a “Ruby Tuesday” where we knew we’d get something pretty good. We were served by a young girl called Amy who Dave teased by telling her Godfrey was a famous musician who’d worked with Dolly Parton, more on Amy later. We spent a lot of the meal time telling our stories of how we met our lovely wives and how we got saved and what from! I consider it a real privilege to have heard Dave and Godfrey’s stories, or if you prefer, their ‘testimonies’ and to share mine with them. They both have powerful stories of Jesus breaking in to rescue and redeem and restore. Hearing of the beginnings of their journey of faith just made me so grateful to have men of God like them influencing, encouraging, and journeying with me. I love these two guys as much as I’ve ever loved anyone other than my wife, I’m going to write about male friendship and love another day on my blog, and knowing them better just makes that love and respect all the stronger.

After our meal we got chatting to Amy, the waitress (remember her?) and Dave ‘fessed up and told her Godfrey was a worship leader doing some meetings in the town and she should come. We found out a few things about her just by asking her about what she thought of Obama, she said she approved of the health care reforms because she’s ill and she also said that she has a two month old daughter. Dave asked her what was wrong and she said she had Crohn's Disease (an auto-immune problem in the intestines what can be pretty horrible) so Dave asked to pray and she put her hand on her stomach and he put his hand on hers and we prayed and told that disease to hit the road. She seemed really moved then Dave gave her some good life words about Jesus revealing himself to her in her dreams and giving her ideas to earn a living in her dreams. She said her stomach felt warm when we were praying so we said we’d come back in later in the week to see her again and see how she was and Godfrey said he’d drop a CD in for her. Clearly we weren’t meant to be eating Sushi next door to the hotel tonight; we were meant to be in “Ruby Tuesday” meeting Amy!

We went back to the hotel feeling good and Dave had another go at his iMovie edit and managed to crack it wide open. He’s well on the way to being a glory filled Welsh Spielberg.

Tomorrow night the ‘British Invasion Of Glory’ starts in earnest…check out the news here soon!