The Phil Files

After going to a school night with Donna — something I actually enjoyed quite a bit more than I anticipated — I was blessed to have a long-time friend come into town. He drove over from Dallas where he had spent the week on business. My friend, Danny, used to live a few minutes up the road from when I lived in Pflugerville — say that three times in a row without spraying someone nearby. He now lives closer to our kids in Kentucky.

Danny and I met at Tuscany’s, a local coffee place, where we visited for about three hours. We laughed and joked. I shared with him about my trip to Uganda with Compassion and showed him pictures and the video of my visit to Doreen. Then we talked about serious stuff.

One great blessing with some friends, and it is this way with Danny and me, you can just pick up and start where you are in your life right now and the years melt away — the love, the respect, the friendship is still there, the easy-ness in conversation comes back and it’s as if you hadn’t been apart. Tonight was a great grace.

As we visited, we both noticed that most of the folks in the place were younger than most of our kids. Some of them looked at us kinda strange, like, “What are you two old geezers doing in here at this time of night?” But we didn’t worry about it, we had become friends in Austin where the famed “Keep Austin Weird” t-shirts reigned supreme. We felt right at home with the local version of the t-shirt, “Keep Abilene Boring.”

While much of Abilene may have felt bored on a fairly innocuous Friday night, Danny and I both felt blessed. Friendship is a taste of heaven, a time and a place where all of our relationships are perfected and we are in the presence of the Lord. For a moment, I got to re-visit what that expectation means in real time. As much as I like the diet Tuscan Sunset, a lemonade, tea, and raspberry drink, the taste of heaven was better.