Kim

I have a friend named Kim.  I don't remember exactly where we met, but I remember where we became friends -- at a park by Sunnyside Elementary watching our kids play Ultimate Frisbee once a week the summer of 2009.  (Well, her daughter played -- my daughters mainly hung around for the social time.)

We sat in our lawn chairs at the side of the "field" and talked.  And somehow our talk turned to drama.  And somehow we came up with the idea of trying to do a play with the homeschoolers that fall.  I'm still not sure where we got the chutzpah.

Thus began four years and eight plays worth of collaboration.  And it has been a God-ordained collaboration.  I never cease to be amazed at how well we mesh in this endeavor.  I write the plays and run the rehearsals -- doing the things I enjoy and do best.  She gathers costumes and props, manages set building, collects money, makes and copies programs -- all the things that would make me insane, but apparently she enjoys (well, I don't know that she enjoys hunting down people for their money . . . ).  This drama program would never have happened if I'd had to do it alone, because her job would have made me cry on a regular basis and I would have been too stressed to go on after the first year.

And yet, despite our different roles, we think so much alike.  I look at the emails she sends out to the parents every week (and just the fact that she sends them, methodically, every week) and think, "That's just how I would have done that.  Yay!"  When we sit down together at my kitchen table after every audition to cast the show, we both come away awed at how God used our separate perceptions of everyone to pull together a perfect cast.  It never fails about halfway through a season that we make some comment about how there's simply no other way this show could have been cast.

God consistently has taken the fish and loaves we each offer to him and multiplied them to feed a multitude.

Kim never gets the credit she deserves for all this.  Because I'm the loudmouth in front of everybody, I seem to get most of the kudos.  And yet she never complains.  She said last Friday that I was the "face" of the program.  But she is the heart that keeps the blood pumping to make it live.

A mutual friend told me once that she was praying for God to bring me a Kim in my drama ministry at Sunnybrook.  I told her I could use a Kim in every aspect of my life.  My Barnabas.  Thank you, friend.