Mile High Meanderings: Louisville, Boulder, Denver...and Lawrence!

And talk of poems and prayers and promises and things that we believe in.
How sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care.
How long it's been since yesterday, what about tomorrow
and what about our dreams and all the memories we share?
John Denver

We left Highlands Ranch (we only left a Richard Rohr book and Lindsay's running shoes) Monday afternoon and headed 50 miles north to Louisville, a beautiful suburb of Boulder. We stayed with Steve and Gunilla Sorensen, a couple I met in 1991, the summer before my senior year in high school. Steve was (and still is!) the head coach and executive director of News Release Basketball, an Evangelical Christian basketball organization that recruits players and coaches to travel to Europe to play games against local club and pro teams and conduct clinics for area youth. I was playing on the team back in '91, but signed up to coach and direct tours from 1997 to 2000.

The Sorensens have had a major impact on my life and thinking. Their focus on Christian discipleship and community formation (as opposed to stressing individual conversion and personal "salvation" models of witness) in both the States and Europe shaped my early understanding of what it means to be a Christian were a vital precursor to my current rooting in Anabaptism. If it looks like Gunilla is 20 years younger than Steve that's because she is ;)...another major impact Steve has had on me.

It was great to reconnect with the Sorensens and Sean/Content VonRoenn (below with their two children: they met each other on News Release tours during the summer of '98). Gunilla is fired up that NRB is bringing a team to her native Sweden for the first time ever!

We went for a run on the Boulder Creek Trail, just a stone's throw from the University of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains:

On Tuesday night, we headed to downtown Denver to find our good friend Gavin Fabian hard at work. He founded MedPassage, a medical tech company, and moved to Denver last year to be geographically close to his business partner...and to get out of Orange County! Gavin refers to his creation as "disruptive," changing the paradigm of how device companies and medical centers conduct business. It's highly collaborative and keeps the powers accountable by disclosing costs of products. It also seeks to eliminate the middle-man--the deeply inefficient medical device company salesman who curries favor with doctors and hospital execs by taking them out to high society dinners and, yes, strip clubs.

Gavin has taken a huge leap-of-faith to start this company as he travels around North America pitching MedPassage to wealthy friends and venture capitalists. When we walked by the sparkling new Davita headquarters building in Denver, he told me that he often wonders if he should just join the 20-somethings in brand new suits making $150,000 at a safe job with solid benefits. Here's to Gavin and MedPassage beating the odds (and the corporate lawyers) to make it big by changing the way devices are bought and sold. It will be a better (and cheaper!) world with a thriving MedPassage.

Gav insisted that we ride bikes to his apartment. He and his wife Christina each have a B-Bikes city membership. $60 per year allows them to use bikes stored at racks all over the city. All they have to do is insert their credit card and they are ready to roll.

In June 2010, I was honored to officiate at the Malibu Canyon wedding of Gavin and Christina ("Gavstini"). Now they live just a few blocks from Coors Field and the Great Divide Brewing Co.

The four of us ate a late dinner on the rooftop of Linger, a chic diner in the LoHi District of Denver, watching the lightening storm go by and then headed downstairs to Little Man for some salted Oreo ice cream.

A very romantic evening. Indeed.

On Wednesday morning, we bid the Sorensens and the Rockies good-bye and hit up the Great Plains. A stop in Colby, Kansas provided hot beverages and a tornado warning.

Our tradition, since Labor Day Weekend 2005 when we got engaged, is to hit up Pyramid Pizza as soon as we arrive in Lawrence:

The weather was perfect for the weekly Concert in the Park: