Author: lindsay

summer in the city: franklin barbecue

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You know how there are those times that a place just doesn’t live up to its hype? Those times when like a MILLION legitimate publications review the place and all RAVE about it and then you go and leave with a “meh” reaction?

This is not one of those times.

I’ve been hearing about Franklin Barbecue since I moved back to Austin about two years ago, and finally decided to take the plunge last Saturday. I went in thinking, “I’m sure it will be good. But how good could it really be? Is it really worth waiting in line in the boiling hot Texas sun for at least four hours? REALLY?“

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And I am here to tell you that I was WRONG.

I was wrong to doubt the barbecue masters all over the country who have praised Aaron Franklin’s skills. I was wrong to doubt the value of waiting in line. I was wrong to doubt how delicious barbecue could be when only seasoned with salt and pepper. (Yes, that’s right. Believe it.)

Going to Franklin’s last Saturday was quite possibly the best decision I’ve ever made in regards to food and putting it in my mouth. 

We did the whole thing. Well, I should say my friends Gregg and Aaron (not Franklin, although that would be cool), did the whole thing. They showed up at 8:15 am (on a SATURDAY in the SUMMER), with lawn chairs and coolers to claim our spot in line. The rest of us lazybones rolled in around 9:30. We hung out, made friends with the people around us and waited.

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When the restaurant opened at 11 a.m. a surge of excitement went through the line. People packed up their lawn chairs and card tables and rushed them back to their cars. We slowly moved up in line, dreaming about what we would order. And finally… right at noon…

It was time.

Taylor and I approached the counter where maybe the nicest man I’ve ever met cutting a brisket greeted us. Asked us how our days were going like there weren’t 100 more people waiting behind us. Thanked us for waiting, and handed us a sample of heaven.. I mean, brisket. It was the most glorious thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I almost wet my pants from excitement. I’m pretty sure Taylor might have shed a tear.

We ordered 1lb of brisket, half lean and half fatty, one link of sausage, 1/2 lb of pork ribs and a small side of cole slaw. Top it off with a Mexican coke and sweet tea and we were ready.

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Sometimes you taste things so good you don’t have words.. only emotion.. to describe them. That’s how this was. We were all just so overwhelmed by how delicious the meat was that there were no words. At one point Aaron Franklin himself stopped by our table to see how we were doing. We all just looked at him holding the meat he smoked with eyes that said, “We’re forever grateful. You’ve changed our lives.” He made a quick joke and moved on, leaving us trying to comprehend how this much flavor could possibly exist.

You might think I’m exaggerating. I am not. At one point, I picked up a piece of lean brisket and it literally fell apart in my hands. That doesn’t happen in normal life.

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Gregg, surrendering to the brisket.

By the time 1 p.m. rolled around we were all feeling so accomplished and spent that we did the only logical thing: went home and took a nap. After all, I felt like I deserved that after making the best decision I’ve ever made in regards to food and putting it in my mouth.

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*I’ll be in Colorado all next week and will be taking a break from posting. But don’t fear, my good friends Peggy and Katie will be filling in with a few guest posts, so y’all show them some love. 

Have a great weekend! 

life is like the trail

lindsay14 Comments

Life is like the trail, and the trail is like life.

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This is the analogy I used to tell high schoolers while we were hiking through the San Juan Mountain range in Southwest Colorado. The campers had signed up for a 6-day backpacking trip with Young Life’s Wilderness Ranch, and I was their guide. 

Usually, on our second day of hiking, after two hours of trekking uphill, I’d get a question like:

How long will we be going up? 

And I would answer with the classic guide answer that every camper loved:

I don’t know. 

And then, we would continue hiking. Because the trail continued on. After a few more rounds of this exchange, I would bring out the analogy during a water break. Life is like the trail. The trail is like life. There are going to be periods of your life when all you feel like you’re doing is struggling your way up a giant mountain. There are going to be times when you’re skipping and running joyfully downhill. There will be mountain top experiences that can’t be reached without the struggle of going uphill. And there will be times in the valley when you look up and want nothing more than to view life from a mountain peak. There will be times of flat ground, where you are just moving through life. There will be slight moments of relief in the uphill battle, and slight moments of struggle in the easy times.

And you’re not really ever sure what’s going to happen next. Sure, you can have an idea. You can think you know. There are trails that I’ve been on enough I could do them without a map. I can picture them in my head. I know the best places to camp and where to find water. But in the entire two summers of guiding, I did not guide one trip where everything went exactly as I thought it would. There were random lightning storms, snow storms, moose charging our campsite, altitude sickness, injuries, a rockslide, a drought that dried up all the water sources. I came to learn that the only thing I knew for sure, the only thing I really had any control over was what was happening right in front of me. I know what the trail looks like right now, with these people, in this situation at 2:04 pm. I have very little idea what will happen around the bend. I certainly have no idea what will happen tomorrow.

The trail will change your plans, but you continue to follow because it’s leading you. And in the process, you let go of the expectation that everything will go according to plan. It absolutely never goes how you think it will.

Taylor and I are heading to Colorado on Saturday. Our original plan was to visit two places we call home. Places we know like the back of our hands and could picture in our heads. Places we can get to without maps.

But this time it will be different. Like every trip out on the trail, it will be different.

Both of these places – Wilderness Ranch and the Bixby family cabin – are right in the middle of the West Fork Complex Fire. One part of the fire is roughly a mile away from the Bixby cabin; another part is sitting on top of the ridge across the lake from Wilderness Ranch. Our family and friends were evacuated last week, and we’ve spent the last 96 hours watching MODIS maps, checking Twitter for updates and trying to do things to take our mind off the fires.

Kayaking on Sunday, for this sole purpose.
Kayaking on Sunday, for this sole purpose.

Every sense of control we try to fabricate is shattered. The fire is so unpredictable that thinking about it in terms of tomorrow is almost laughable. Our only hope is in today. Our prayer is for today. Because that is what’s in front of us. We are growing in gratitude for each new day that our beloved places are still standing because we are realizing more and more that it may not be the case tomorrow.

This is the last thing I ever expected. In my mind, those places were invincible. Nothing bad could or would ever happen to them. As much as I love them, I took them for granted. And the last five days I’ve been on my knees begging from the depths of my heart for God to protect those places. To protect the firefighters bravely battling day after day.

The fires changed our plans. We won’t be seeing Wilderness and most likely won’t be visiting our cabin, but we are still going to Colorado. We have no idea where we’ll be or what we’ll do when we get there. We don’t have a plan anymore, we’re just going to be. Because that is where we belong: in our home, in the midst of the broken and beautiful mountains, with people who love these places too. Because home is not so much a physical place as it is people you love, and the stories that bond you together. Because God is still God, even in the unexpected. And because the trail continues, and we’re just trying to put one foot in front of the other.

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This morning we received an email update from Taylor’s grandmother, Ann, who was evacuated from our cabin. Her email ended like this:

Expect the unexpected and anticipate miracles, for with God all things are possible. 

And pray anyway, 

Ann

And so here we are. Heading home knowing it will be different, only expecting what our minds can’t think of, and begging God for a miracle. No matter where the trail leads, we will choose to believe that God is still God. We will pray anyway.

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themes for summer: part III

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One of my favorite things about being a Young Life leader in college was hearing my high school girls pray. Most of the time, it would require a bit of prompting and encouragement to pray out loud in front of their friends, but I always thought it was beautiful. Not because they used fancy words, or talked for a really long time, but because they were themselves. They were high schools girls; filled with joy and love and insecurities and fear. They were figuring out what a relationship with Jesus meant for them, and showing so much courage in that process. That’s what came through when they prayed.

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The word I used the most when talking with them about prayer was honesty. Be honest when you pray. Tell God what’s really going on in your heart. He can handle it. He knows it perfectly, yes, but he wants you to trust him enough to actually pray for what you want, to pray about what’s actually happening and how you actually feel about it.

There are those moments when you are able to speak truth to a friend with such conviction because you believe it to be true in your own life. And then there are the moments where you are able to speak truth because you know in your mind it’s true, but your heart is churning because you know you don’t completely believe what you’re saying.

Enter the last two years of my life.

No, I didn’t stop journaling in that time. No, I didn’t stop being honest in my prayers. My journal from Fall 2011 is probably the most raw, real, emotion-filled, uncensored journal to date. I didn’t hold anything back with God. I told him exactly how I felt and what I thought about him bringing me back to Austin- at the time the last place on earth I wanted to be. But somewhere along the way, I grew weary. I said all I had to say, and had nothing left. It was the same old pain, the same old issues, the same old hurt day after day after day. And I gradually grew tired of processing, of thinking, of praying about it.

So I started praying things like,

God, heal my heart. 

Help me be content in my circumstances. 

Glorify your name through this. 

Now don’t get me wrong, those are not bad things to pray. It’s just that nothing in my heart wanted those things. Nothing. They were half-hearted prayers. But I didn’t know what else to say. I felt like I had said everything, and because I didn’t get answers instantly (see Themes for Summer: Part I), I began praying what I thought I should pray. See, prayers that you feel like you should pray sound good. They look nice and tidy on the outside. The only problem is there is no faith to back them up. They are empty words.

And that’s what I began praying: empty words. In doing so, I became jaded. I began to lose faith that God really could do more than the craziest thing I could imagine. And not just that He could do it… but that he would do it. In my life, my marriage, my job, my relationships, my heart.

But here’s the tricky part: that was all happening deep deep down. So deep down that I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize that to you maybe even two months ago. On the surface, everything looked fine. I was journaling, praying and being honest about my feelings and thoughts. I was confessing sin. I was even asking God for things. But I didn’t believe he actually cared, or could really do anything about it. When it came to asking God for the real things…. you know, that dream in your heart that you talk yourself out of asking for because it feels too big… when it came to asking for those things, it was back to “Help me be content in my circumstances.” I was too afraid to pray for what I really wanted. I was too afraid of being told no. And so I wallowed in general prayers, all the while gradually losing faith in the power of my God.

Last weekend, I listened to a podcast from Austin Stone on wholehearted prayer. If you haven’t listened to it, you should. It rocked me. It was like someone waking me up from a sleep. A sleep I had lulled myself into by praying things I didn’t mean. A sleep that made me forget who my God is. That he parted seas, and raised people from the dead, and did the most unimaginable thing of reconciling us back to Him through his son Jesus. I had forgotten that because of that most unimaginable thing, I am called God’s child. He is my Father. He created me and gives me desires in my heart, and I have permission to beg him for those desires to become a reality. I have permission to beg God to act. It doesn’t always mean the answer will be yes, or that He will move in the exact way I ask Him to. But I’m choosing to believe that if He’s not going to move mountains in my circumstances, then He will move them in my heart.

The verse that stuck out to me the most from that sermon is James 4:3:

You do not have, because you do not ask. 

That is haunting to me. The last thing I want is to meet Jesus face to face, for him to tell me “Well done,” and then to say, “You could’ve seen Me do so much more had you had the faith to ask for it.” No no no. That is not what I want my life to be about. I do not want my life to be about sounding good or playing it safe or giving in to fear. We serve the God who literally created everything in existence. We would be fools to not ask big, specific things of our God.. especially out of fear… since he loves us perfectly and there is no fear in love.

So this summer, in addition to patience and thankfulness, I’m abandoning general prayers. I’m abandoning fear that keeps me from asking God for big things. I’m abandoning playing it safe. God has done so much in my life despite my lack of belief. How much more could he do if I actually believed that He is who He says He is?

I’m going back to being honest, to praying big and crazy, and begging God to replace my unbelief with belief. Even as I’m writing this my heart is stirring. I can not wait to see what God has in store. I expect that it will be one heck of a ride. Why don’t you come along?