So how many states have YOU visited in one night?

Four. Count 'em, four states I was in last night. And only ONE of those was my usual state of confusion.

Wednesday morning I received an email from Nathan Sawyer, one of the pastors of our sister church, Grace Church, and the man who is filling our pulpit during our diligent pastor search. He was having a fellowhip at his and April's home for the singles from their church, and he asked if I would like to come, and if I had any friends who might be interested.

What?!? Biblical fellowship that I am so desperately craving right now, and a chance to meet new people? Sign me up, brother! (I didn't really want to go to my high school reunion anyway.) I invited two friends: Amber, who knows Nathan from working at Starbucks together; and Melissa Hefner, who I figured could use some Christian fellowship and fun. Amber ended up having to cancel because of a prior commitment to her own church that she had forgotten about, so Melissa and I set out on... well, more of an adventure than we had planned.

Lissa's parents didn't feel that her car was reliable enough for her to drive into Memphis from Tipton County, so I agreed to come out to Millington and meet her at Wal-Mart to pick her up. I REALLY wanted her to come, and was thrilled that she readily agreed, so I was willing to go the extra mile (or thirty.) On my way to meet her, it occurred to me that I had left the address and MapQuested directions to his house on my desk at work, so I stopped by my mom's house to check my email, reprint the directions, and borrow her car since mine is a toxic waste dump that I didn't have time to clean, and wasn't fit for further human occupation. The slow and steady pace of Mom's dial-up computer put us about ten minutes behind schedule, but that was okay; we still had plenty of time to get there by 7:00. Off we were like a herd of... turtles.

I should mention that when I MapQuested the directions, I also added the directions from his house to mine, because I knew that I would need to go by and let Gus out before I took her back to Millington. Melissa, as keeper of the map and my faithful navigator, was not aware of this. At some point during the drive, as we were chatting and jamming out to Kings of Leon, she skipped a few steps in the directions. I was becoming more and more amazed at how close Nathan's house acually was to my apartment. When she told me to turn onto Peabody, it finally occurred to me what had happened. She was taking me to MY place!

Well, since we were so close, I decided I needed to stop by my apartment before we finished the trip to Nathan's to face the consequences of my excessive coffee consumption. So a few minutes later, we were back on the road; two blondes, trying to follow MapQuest's already iffy directions in reverse.

By this time, I was feeling bad about Nathan, having prepared food for us, probably at this point thinking that we just weren't going to show up. And I hadn't put his number in my phone or brought it with me. So we called Kevin Hinton to get his number, and he gave it to us, but thought it was the number for his office, so it wouldn't do us much good. He had a pretty good idea, however, of how to get to Nate's house, so following his directions, we set out on what- we thought- was finally the right direction. As we passed the Mississippi state line, we realized that we had probably missed a turn.

So Melissa tried the number Kevin had given us for Nathan, and it WAS his cell phone number. We told him between bouts of hysterical laughter that we were trying to get there but were hopelessly lost. He gave us THREE STEPS to follow, and told us to call him when we got to that point and he would direct us further. Well, we called him back as we were coming BACK from Arkansas to tell him that we were still lost.

Well, we eventually found the place amid much help and teasing from Nathan. At this point, I was a nervous wreck and didn't even bother trying to carefully parallell park on the curb; I pretty much abandoned the car in the middle of the road. We were past the point of being fashionably late, but we had a good story to tell! We had some great burgers, coffee that only a Starbucks barista could prepare in his home, and met some incredibly nice people. Nathan and April's home is beautiful, and we had a great time.

As a sidenote, I have been secretly (okay, not so secretly) hoping that Nathan would be called to come to our church as our permanent pastor. But I had an opportunity last night to see what God is doing through his ministry at Grace, and it's beautiful.