Minutes to Memories

A picture of Jeff Richardson (far right) & family unashamedly stolen from his website!

My friend, John Dobbs, is undoubtedly the king of the blog world. There are no rivals.

John's personal blog is a regular meal for so many people in the world (he told me his secret, but I'm not telling!). In addition to all the neat stuff he posts there, he's started doing us all a service and sifting through a thousand blogs or so and picking out some highlights for the rest of us. Today, he linked to my old friend Jeff Richardson.

This was neat because I had lost track of where Jeff Richardson was in this world, and although John doesn't know Jeff personally, his blog presence hooked the two of us up again, which is just pretty cool.

I transferred to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville at the beginning of my sophomore year in the fall of 1989, and my roommate and I began attending the North Street Church of Christ. It took about two seconds for me to start hearing the name of Jeff Richardson, though he was actually nowhere to be seen. If I remember correctly, he had an engineering internship that semester, so he wasn't around the campus ministry at all, but I could tell from all the Jeff references that he was a central figure to the group. And to be honest, revealing a personal character flaw here, that simple fact made me suspect I wouldn't like him.

You probably know what I expected: the self-centered, arrogant, God's gift to the world type of person. And nothing could have been further from the truth.

It turned out that Jeff was both humble and hilarious (two VERY good traits in my book). He was also brilliant and talented, but those were only icing on the cake to me. His goofy sense of humor combined with that Jesus-style humility made him the life of the party in the way someone ought to be the life of the party.

I guess in a way he did sort of turn out to be God's gift to the world after all.

Before long, I was a part of a prayer group at my apartment that involved Jeff. I guess praying together is a way to know a person's heart, and I was blessed to get to know his.

It doesn't surprise me that cruising around Jeff's blogs and picture pages today revealed that he's lived a neat life since our good old days at the University of Arkansas. He married a great girl in Trisha (the sister of my best friend in Fayetteville) and has two wonderful daughters. His intellect is still about a gazillion light years ahead of most of the world, but his infatuation with Jesus is obviously as strong as ever.

Thanks, John, for stumbling across Jeff in your trek across the worldwide web. Just the name brought back some great memories.

# posted by Al Sturgeon @ 9:31 PM