Wedding Showers, Belt Buckles and a lake in a pasture?

I’m not nearly a good enough writer to express the uniqueness of our experience last night. We went to a wedding shower for a young man whom we have watched grow up over the last 13 years of our marriage (Kiley has known his family most of her life). He is a young man who loves Jesus and so does his future bride.

First, it was a couples’ wedding shower, which I’m not all the fond of, to be honest. I believe that “shwoers” were invented for women and the planning therein is reflected by their taste in “activities.” Secondly, I am a natural introvert, and, although I really do enjoy the extended family and friends here, I’m not exactly jumping up and down to sit and visit with people I don’t know well for an extended period of time. So, needless to say, I wasn’t all that thrilled with going to the “shower” but I decided to play nice and go, plus, someone said something about a lake, a jet-ski and a BBQ so my thought was, “OK, they’re at least TRYING to make this something for the men too.”

I’ve been getting to know Sand Hills culture for 14 years now. I should not have been surprised by what I experienced, but I was…

Life here can be so cool and so different from anywhere else…

Let me see if I can do it justice and paint a picture for you:

After the five miles of dirt road off of the highway, we arrived at the Moreland ranch house. I thought we had arrived, but no, that’s not where the party was to be held. There were a few cars parked across a field that pointed the way, so we turned off of the road and began bumping our way across field after field. Finally, we came up over a steep hill and spotted several cars parked together next to an outhouse (by outhouse, I mean a structure with four walls, no roof and a fence around it to keep the cows from rubbing against it and tipping it over). We knew we’d found the spot. We unloaded our chairs and food and headed over the hill. As we crested the hill, an incredible view came into sight. Hill after rolling hill were framed by a small, private lake. Just below us was a sandy beach bordered by sand hill grass and short reeds.

Much of the party had already arrived and were sitting in camp chairs around the picnic tables. I knew instantly that I looked the part of the Californian in my shorts, flops and shades. Every other guy there, except two who were swimming and my father-in-law, was in Wranglers, a button up shirt, white straw cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and a big silver belt buckle. I knew I wasn’t in California anymore.

Our boys quickly changed into their swimming trunks and headed for the lake. It wasn’t long and they were building sand castles, throwing sand at one another and basically having the time of their lives. I, on the other hand, decided to sit and observe.

A “mule,” which is basically a four-wheel drive heavy duty golf car soon arrived pulliing a jet-ski and a bunch of old fence posts. The Jet-ski went in the lake and the fence posts were used to start a roaring bonfire.

More guests trickled in. it’s haying season, so many of the families were bailing hay right up until it they had to leave to get to the party. Every guy was still wearing the same sand hills uniform…

The shower games soon began…a couples’ timed wheel-barrow race (with the lady sitting in a real wheelbarrow), three-legged race with a burlap sack that had just been emptied and more…

What is so intriguing and refreshing about our friends and family here is that, if you’re family, it doesn’t matter where you live (or how you dress for that matter), you’re part of them. There is no “avoiding the California kids,” instead, they seem to know the happenings of our lives and I always enjoy our conversation. Many of our family and friends here are extremely well-traveled (much more so than I am), which, unfortunately, I think would catch many off guard.

One thing that did catch me off balance was watching these tough-looking and weathered ranchers dive into the shower games like kids in a candy store. We laughed at each other and ourselves the whole time. I’ve rarely been anywhere else in the country where men were so ready to have fun without the fear, somehow, of giving up their “man card.” These guys are men to the core and yet were more than willing to do the silly stuff we did.

As the games ended and we began roasting the hot dogs and s’mores over the fence-post bonfire just over the lake at the edge of the horizon a full moon rose and lit the place up like only it can. I sat in my chair and just basked in the amazing creativity of a God who makes lakes, full moons, Californians and Cowboys and imagined the glory of heaven. It will be there that we’ll have tens of thousands of years of such experiences. Days of getting to know people and cultures, all who love our Savior, from all times, places, backgrounds, ethnicities and experiences. People who are real, who laugh, who love deeply, and who are as different as our Heavenly Father can make them. I look forward to that day more so after experiencing a perfect day such as this.

We rinsed the caked sand off of our tired boys in the lake, packed up our things and said good night. We followed the caravans of 4x4s through the fields back to the dirt road and across the hills in the shining moonlight until we reached the Cobb ranch with two very sleepy children. As we carried them up to bed, we could hear the coyotes off in the distance singing away in the night.