Why God made man

I thought I’d share some photos with you from my trip to Portland. Meet Penny C. and Don Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz. Penny is featured in the book.

You might remember Penny from a few weeks ago when I was in Seattle at the Wm. Paul Young event. Penny gets around. Or I do. Maybe we both do. She volunteered at the Portland conference.

A lot of folks showed up for the event at Portland’s Armory. 

Most of them were better students than me. I was fooling with the camera while they were listening and working.

The conference kept us busy so there wasn’t really time to visit with folks until afterwards when Penny, Pastor Larry and Pastor Nick all met up at Powell’s.

One of my fav parts is always meeting folks. Kyle ‘s from Arizona and apparently we’ve been Twitter friends for awhile ’cause when I sat down that first night, Kyle leaned over and said, “You’re Karen Zacharias, right?” I’m thankful that others keep up with me because I have a hard time doing it myself and it’s particularly handy that others know who I am ’cause honestly sometimes, I have this feeling that I’ve got one foot on reality and the other on a seaweed. The thing about meeting folks like Kyle is learning their story, which is always so much more interesting than mine. Kyle taught English in Kazakhstan! You can read all about his adventures here.   Kyle’s an awesome guy, who spent his last dime to get to the storyline conference and I still don’t know where he slept while he was there. His dad’s one of the 2 million unemployed right now and Kyle’s been helping out the family. Oh. Just read his blog, you’ll see. Happy Birthday, Kyle. Hope it was a good one.

I stuck around Portland after the conference because Scot McKnight was giving a lecture at George Fox University on Wednesday. Stay tuned for more with McKnight.

I also made time to run down to a college in the valley where I was able to spend some time with The Redhead’s daughter — that’s her in the red — and her friends. She started her freshman year of college on Monday so it was great to be able to share a little bit of that with her. She got a new hair-do, too, and I love it! I think I shocked these kids with my story about the Demon Dog, however. Poor things were getting sick just listening to me recount the incident!

I got home in time to keep a date with the Lennon sisters on Thursday. Okay, well, they aren’t the Lennon sisters but they could be. These sisters kept me entertained all through lunch with the stories of their childhood in Pendleton. Not to mention the stories of their own assorted lives now. These are the gals that told me that hilarious story about the Holly Bibbel.

It’s been said that God made man because he loves a good story.

I believe that.