Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Meeting Steve Peifer

Carol and I had the honor of meeting Steve Peifer Saturday night.  We drove up to Boca Raton for dinner with Steve at P.F. Chang's, and Mary was with us.  She had gotten to know Steve and his wife well when Mary was at RVA.  I'm still thinking about that occasion with Steve, having never met anyone like him.  Ever. 

As evident in his recent book A Dream so Big,  he is a natural story teller.  He doesn't take several pages to tell the story.  He can grab you and finish you off in a paragraph on the written page and in a few sentences over a meal.  Grab you and finish with you unforgettably.  What a gift!

And there are gifts onto gifts with Steve, because his stories are about his interactions with people.  That gift on the gift of story telling is the way he creates a story.  He has a natural willingness to engage people in situations in which people like me would not engage (would not engage as my brothers the priest and the Levite in Luke 10 would not engage).  I would, for example, have ignored the young woman who walked up to Steve early one morning in a 24 hour grocery store in the States to  tell him in a challenging way about her very recent coke-fueled debauchery.  Steve said he looked at her and asked her what she was doing with her life.  She broke down in tears and followed him to his car in the parking lot, where they prayed and she gave her life to Christ.  And that wasn't it.  That story goes on about God's restorative Grace in this young woman's life.  Steve's right in the middle of it.  Good grief!  Wake up, Stokes!  What is going on around you into which God would call you if you just got out of and over yourself?

The Huffington Post has an excerpt of his book.

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