I am getting ready to leave on a trip that is one of the highlights of my year. It's not going to be quite what it usually is this year, due to the unavoidable absence of a couple of members of the group. But I'm very much looking forward to it. We will miss you, girls. We love you and the cabin misses you too.

I'll be back on Tuesday. In the meantime, stop by the blogs of a couple of friends and mentors of mine. David Stevens is the editor of the Clovis News Journal, and is the man who gave me my first job in newspapers back in 2002, when there was very little real evidence that this was even remotely a good idea. David convinced me to move to Clovis, taught me everything I know about newspapers, including that there is no crying in journalism and that sometimes you have to play hardball, and he is one of my heroes. Still, I like to think I have some influence over him, too. After all, he did get a blog after he started reading mine. His blog is "Falling, With Style" and I have linked directly to a great post he wrote about his anniversary with his wonderful wife, Rhonda.

Get Religion is a blog headed up, in part, by Terry Mattingly, religion columnist and known to those who love him as Tmatt. Terry is one of the leaders of a journalism program in Washington D.C. that recruits students from Christian colleges and unversities, which often don't have established journalism programs, but often have students who would like to get into the field. (This lack of journalism programs by evangelical schools is another soapbox of mine, but that's for another day.) Tmatt admitted me into the program in the summer of 2000 based on a set of clips that, once again, indicated very little about why this might be a good idea. And on the other side of that month in Washington, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. More importantly, I felt like it might be something I could do, because Tmatt believed I could do it. Six years later, I'm a newspaper reporter, and that's a very important calling to me.

Tmatt's blog is run by a group of media types who critique and analyze mainstream media coverage of religion.

These men taught me a lot, and in the terms of human influence, they collectively set in motion a chain of events that got me to New Mexico, where I started dating Dan, where we fell in love, got married, moved to Albuquerque and on and on and on. In retrospect, it's always tempting to remember the moments that ultimately changed your life as having this radiant glow around them. I'm pretty sure that when I met Tmatt, and later, David, I was mostly just incredibly nervous with that unique form of anxiety that comes from knowing you're in over your head. But when I look back, it's hard not to see that it was all meant to be.

Happy Labor Day.