Paul and I are writing a book and this is my intro:

Have you ever sat outside on a summer night and just soaked in the stars—really absorbed them? To me, those seem some of the best times to think. I don’t believe that it gets much better than a warm summer night, enjoying the stars and contemplating questions that only the Creator of those stars can answer.

During the summers back in jr. high school, my friend Sam and I used to sit out on my trampoline at night. We’d lay there, our backs sinking into the black mesh, still warm from the summer sun that afternoon, and stare into the night sky. We didn’t really discuss anything too deep. Mostly our conversations revolved around the Animorphs book series and what it would be like to have the ability to morph into an animal. All summer Sam and I would lay out there on the trampoline talking with the stars watching over us. They were hardly impressive from within the city, washed out by light that flooded every street corner, keeping the dark from showing it’s face. But the few that peeked through the urban glow were beautiful none-the-less, and to a couple of guys in jr. high, they were wonderful company for late night conversation.

It wasn’t until a few summers later that I really got to experience the stars in all of their splendor for the first time.

Even now, years later, I remember it so well. My neighbor, Nancy, was a professor in the music department at Auburn University, an artist and a family friend. She was always taking us in, teaching me how to paint or giving me private clarinet lessons—she welcomed our company and treated us like we were her own.

Nancy had family reservations to stay in LeConte Lodge in the Smokeys and every summer her and her parents would leave town for a few days, entrusting the care of her pug, Boomer, to us, while they hiked Mt. LeConte. They would climb one of several trails, camp in the lodge on top for the night and then return the next morning to the trailhead at the base of the mountain.

One year my parents notified me that Nancy’s mother wasn’t going to be able to make the hike that year, and that Nancy had offered to take me in her place. It was an exciting thing for a teenage boy who grew up in a college town to get an opportunity to leave his home and go hiking in the Smokey’s, launch off into the unknown—no school bells, no homework or fenced in yards, just me and the wild mountains of Eastern Tennessee.

In the weeks preceding my first hiking trip with Nancy the anticipation built. My first real adventure outside of hiking and camping in the state park near Auburn—sure Nancy would be there, but not my parents—just the two of us and the wilderness. So on a beautiful morning, late in the summer, we headed out on our adventure.

The hike was nothing short of spectacular, the view was amazing and the sights blew me away. I know the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee are hardly Mt. Everest, or even the Rockies, but to me at that time, I was on the frontier—forging my way through the wild, discovering new things that no man had yet laid eyes on. I was free from civilization and set loose in a place that only my imagination could fathom.

Once we made it to the top we were beat. Turns out city boys, even “soccer stars” like myself don’t know how to handle long hikes up 6000 feet of rugged mountain terrain and the 6-mile trail took it out of me. But when I reached the lodge suddenly the exhaustion faded into readiness—I was revived with a surprising new energy. Maybe it was the excitement, maybe the hot chocolate and cookies that they fed me as soon as I arrived—I’d like to think that it was the clean mountain air. The air up there is incredible, so far removed from what we breath down in the city that it’s fresh—the way I imagine it was when God first breathed air into the world. Regardless of the source, I was rejuvenated and took off exploring the trails and paths on the top of the mountain.

Fresh with new energy and full on hot chocolate and cookies I devised a single goal: find a bear. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) the only wildlife that I encountered on that trip were deer (big scary ones albeit). I did find something else though—something that inspired me and was more meaningful and moving to me than the sighting of a bear could have possibly been.

Late that night I ventured out for one last walk down some trails before going to sleep. I was putting off sleep because to me, sleep meant the inevitable—the hike down first thing in the morning would come when I woke. I remember walking up a trail that led to a clearing: the helipad. By helipad I mean big field. It was the space they used in emergencies to land the helicopter for air evacuations. As I left the trail and stepped into the open expanse of the field, suddenly my sight was unhindered by trees—and I was met by the stars.

It was in this moment that I first realized that stars really are as they appear in science books and on TV shows. Until that point my only experience with the stars was from my home in the city, drowned out by the glow of city light pollution.

All of the light that normally blotted out the stars was stripped away by my elevation—I stood there in awe as I soaked in the grandness of the universe, swallowed in the brilliancy of the stars. I remember the moon vividly. It hung there larger than life, filling the night sky in a majestic way that I’d never even imagined before.

In an instant the night sky was transformed before my eyes. It became so much more amazing—as if I was no longer under it, but in it, immersed in its infinity. No matter what direction I looked, I was surrounded by the vast expanse of space. The stars winked at me as if saying, “yeah, it’s big from up here huh?” I just stood there with my jaw dropped and stared. The kind of deep, dissecting stare that your parents yell at you about in restaurants when you’re a kid and you can’t tear your eyes away from the man with one leg sitting across the room. On that mountain I experienced for the first time the wonder of God’s creation in the stars.

I used to see God the way that I saw those stars—all of the junk in my life there in Auburn blocked him out, diminishing him to nothing more than a faint glow in the distance. Reynosa, Mexico, much like the top of that mountain, took me beyond all that I knew and introduced me to a new God—a God who was bigger, wiser and more wonderful than I had ever known. For the first time in my life I felt like God was there with me, and I saw Him more for who He really is—a real and present God—and less like a Sunday School character. Let me tell you how it happened…

(this isn’t officially done yet…we’re still tweaking it and the editors still haven’t all responded on it yet…but you get the gist…comments welcomed!)