A young friend sat across the table from me at lunch today and somehow — I forgot how it started — got me talking about my cowboying period. Yes sir, I recall every detail of those three days.

I was a young minister on the staff of Jackson, Mississippi’s First Baptist Church. That summer the student minister had taken two busloads of college kids to our conference center at Glorieta, New Mexico. Afterwards, they planned to take a rustic excursion into the Santa Fe Wilderness for a few days of camping. Murph called me on Friday and said, “Can you fly out here and go with us? I need you.”

At the time, I’d never been to Glorieta and had never flown west at all, so I had no way of knowing you do not want to fly from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. A friend who owned a travel agency in Jackson worked up the tickets and I was on my way: Jackson to Dallas-Fort Worth to Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Everything was fine until I got to Albuquerque. The airport people had to direct me to the desk for the Santa Fe Airways. A fellow who could have been a pilot or the mechanic handed me his business card and said, “That will be your boarding pass.”

The airline had two little Cessnas and for this trip, two passengers, me and this other Indian. They put our luggage on one plane and us on the other and off we went. For the next 45 minutes the updrafts from those mountains bounced us up and down across the sky. Nothing about it was fun.

Murph and the buses filled with collegians were waiting at the airport, we ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant, and we headed out of town. We arrived at our destination around 4 o’clock that evening, only to find that the ranch people had forgotten us. The reluctant cowboys had to go looking for horses to take us and our luggage the several miles back into the wilderness. Half of our group started walking on and the rest of us waited for the horses. We were midnight arriving at the campsite, and then had to set up tents. Not a good beginning.

It was cold in those mountains, but gloriously beautiful. We were miles away from another living soul. For the next three days, we explored and hiked, held Bible studies, played games, ate great food (our adult leaders had come prepared), and hovered by the fire to keep warm. On our final day, the cowboys arrived with horses. Alas, we had more luggage and baggage than they were prepared for. Robbie Bell and I were designated to stay with the remaining paraphernalia while everyone else headed out of the mountains following the cowboys.

Now, looking back, that was interesting. Here we were, a young married minister and a young married woman on that remote mountain alone for some four hours. Will you believe me when I say that we were so circumspect that we didn’t even chat during all that time. She stayed on one side of the hill and I the other.

When the cowboys returned that afternoon, they loaded up everything on the pack horses, gave Robbie a horse to ride and three to lead and me the same. We rode off those mountains through little streams and creeks, past high meadows and Aspen woods, all the while pulling our string of pack horses.

It’s the closest I ever came to being a cowboy. And it was great fun.

The buses were waiting, the students were bored and tired and ready to head home, and I had about had my fill of that saddle.

Some of our friends who were on that trip read this blog. I’d be interested to know what they remember about it. As I say, I recall almost every detail since it was so radically different from anything I’d ever done before or would ever do again.

When I was a freshman at Berry College near Rome, Georgia, the curriculum required us to take 6 weeks of various kinds of physical education. For 6 weeks all the boys boxed, for 6 weeks everyone of us wrestled, we played football, soccer, basketball, and even trampoline. Years later, when I wanted to impress my sons and their friends with my athletic prowess, I would drop into the conversation lines like, “Well, when I was boxing in college….” or “when I was playing football in college….” The kids’ eyes would bulge and one would say, “You played college ball?” “Yep,” I said. And grew ten feet in their estimation.

I didn’t say how long I played. Or how well. Only that I did.

Likewise, I used to be a cowboy.

One wonders if some people look back to the few hours they have actually spent in church services and make of it something more than it is. “When I joined the church.” “When I was baptized.”

I’m no cowboy and was never much of an athlete. Those and living for Jesus Christ are all about entire ways of ordering one’s life.