One of the joys from Jennica’s wedding this past Saturday was hosting our friend Gabbi, who came and stayed with us Thursday until she left last night. I met Gabbi my senior year at Oxy (1996) when she and Jennica were frosh in the dorm I lived in. At the end of that year, though, she had to transfer, and went back Oregon to go to school.We’ve kept in touch over the past 9 years - I took a trip up to Portland after I graduated, Gabbi has visited in Los Angeles with Jennica - but it had been a while since we caught up on each other’s lives. So Sunday afternoon, after all of the wedding festivities were over and after Vero & I had preached at 2 services at church (worth its own post), we came home and hung out with Gabbi until her plane left in the late afternoon.

As we shared old stories about her year at Oxy, our conversation turned more serious. She said, “Scott, my memory of that year, honestly, is just darkness and light. I don’t really remember all of the year.” Ironic, I told her. That year - and how I saw God work in her life - changed me. As I look back on 9 years of campus ministry, my experience with God ministering to Gabbi was the most significant single factor in how God spoke to me about my call to ministry.

Funny thing, though. For all of the times that I’ve told Gabbi’s story - in my preaching, with my staff teams and friends - Gabbi had no idea. Yesterday, as we shared deeply about how God had been at work in us both since that year, she shared, “I had no idea. I’ve often wondered, with some regret, about why God had me come down to LA. I’m so encouraged to know that God was doing so much for you, not just for me.”

So much, in fact, that I remembered that I shared my story of that year with Gabbi in the introductory chapter to a book proposal that I’m working. In response to my experience with Gabbi, I wrote,

“I saw God in a whole new way - God’s persistence in how he kept initiating with me; God’s strength in how he kept building me up when I felt lame; God’s power in how he kept me going when I often wanted to give up. Gabbi was changed by God. But so was I.”

Gabbi & I sometime during my senior year at Oxy.

Gabbi & Jennica: Then & Now.