2019 Trip
5/23-5/25 Boone/Blowing Rock
5/25-5/26 in Pisgah Natl Forest
5/26-5/28 in Asheville

Thursday hike:
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/north-carolina/glen-burney-trail
Friday hike:
https://ashevilletrails.com/blue-ridge-parkway/rough-ridge-hike/
Saturday hike:
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/north-carolina/hawksbill-mountain-trail
Sunday Hike:
https://ashevilletrails.com/blue-ridge-parkway/crabtree-falls-nc/

• Camp Coffee, Blowing Rock - we didn’t get here! Next time!
• Hatchet Coffee, Boone https://hatchetcoffee.com/ This was a great place to hit up before our hike! Our coffee was great and they have little pastries and snacks too, and they also will give you a tour of the coffee roasting.
• Juice Boone (juice, smoothies) http://juiceboone.com/ Great, albeit pricey, smoothies and juices.
• Melanie’s Food Fantasy, Boone (breakfast and lunch)
• Eat Kindly, Boone (Vegan, smoothies)
• ...

Louisville:

Where we stayed

• The Hotel Distil (Marriott)
  https://hoteldistil.com
  This hotel was great, even during COVID. We loved how new and clean everything was and it was a great location too.

• The Brown Hotel
  https://www.brownhotel.com/
  We stayed here previously, and this hotel was also very nice, but not as modern.

Coffeeshops, etc:

• Quill’s Coffee, Highlands, Louisville
  Quills has several locations, and they all serve great coffee. Another thing that we usually care a lot about in a coffeeshop… the accoutrements. Quills has great food at each location.
  https://quillscoffee.com/

• Steel City Pops, Highlands
  https://steelcitypops.com/locations/louisville/

Also Shred415 is in Louisville! I got my workout on!!!
https://shred415.com/locations/highlands

Lexington:

Where we stayed

• Origin Hotel (very cool and new, near Keeneland, DOG FRIENDLY!)...

This self love of ours
“This self-love of ours so blinds us that we make the smallest faults in the world to be akin to heinous and unpardonable sins. We have this evil so deeply rooted in our hearts that if we are told of our duty, it only half moves us.

For this reason, St. Paul sets the example of God before us here. He has forgiven us in His only Son. And without delay He adds our Lord Jesus Christ, who spared not Himself when it was a question of our redemption and salvation.

What, then, can break down all hardness in us, what can mortify all our excessive passions, what can correct all our cruelty, bring low all our pride and loftiness and sweeten all our bitterness, is this: to contemplate what God has done towards us. He has so loved the world that He has given up His only Son to death for us (John 3:16)…

What has moved God to show Himself so merciful towards us? Nothing else...

“ ‘I hear you are entering the ministry,’ the woman said down the long table, meaning no real harm. ‘Was it your own idea or were you poorly advised?’ And the answer that she could not have heard even if I had given it was that it was not an idea at all, neither my own or anyone else’s. It was a lump in the throat. It was an itching in the feet. It was a stirring in the blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening in the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and could not even name the name for sure.”
-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

No man is
“Humanity is like an enormous spider web, so that if you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling… Our lives are linked together. No man is an island.”
-Frederick...

Spiritual Capitalism
“After an optimistic explosion that we call hope, and an ensuing sense of deep safety, comes an experience of deep rest. It’s the verb, I’m told, that is most used by the mystics of all religions: some kind of “resting in God.” All of our striving and our need to perform, climb, and achieve becomes, on some very real level, unnecessary. The gift, the presence, the fullness is already here, now. I can stop all this overproduction and over-proving of myself. That’s Western and American culture. It’s not the Gospel, and yet we have made the Gospel conform to the meritocracy of most cultures.
One thing that got me into men’s work is that I found that males are especially driven by the performance principle. Most males just cannot believe that we could be respected, admired, received, or loved without some level of achievement. So many of us are performers and...

People do not drift toward Holiness.

“Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”

For the Love of God

“If you get to know any Christian well, getting to know a Christian is a little like trying to look for a mountain on a cloudy day. You watch and you watch and you see the wind swirls and blows things around and at a certain point you can make out the peak and other times it’s completely cloudy. Then all the sudden the wind could just rip right through a cloud and you can see the snow on the mountain; and you see the sun just briefly shinning on it and it takes your breath away and than the next thing you know is back has come the fog. Getting to know a Christian is like that…You get a glimpse every so often of the gorgeous, radiant, perfect, the glory person, the glory self, that this person is becoming. You get a vision of what this person would be if this person was not shackled and fettered by his or her sins and faults. You get an idea of the beauty of it and the glory of it and you...

Conviction of sin is best described in the words:

My sins, my sins, my Savior,
How sad on Thee they fall.

Conviction of sin is one of the most uncommon things that ever happens to a person. It is the beginning of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict people of sin (see John 16:8). And when the Holy Spirit stirs a person’s conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not that person’s relationship with others that bothers him but his relationship with God— “Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight…” (Psalm 51:4). The wonders of conviction of sin, forgiveness, and holiness are so interwoven that it is only the forgiven person who is truly holy. He proves he is forgiven by being the opposite of what he was previously, by the grace of God. Repentance always brings a person to the point of...

“I can truly say, that I bear you upon my heart and in my prayers. I have rejoiced to see the beginning of a good and gracious work in you.

And I have confidence in the Lord Jesus, that He will carry it on and complete it and that you will be amongst the number of those who shall sing redeeming love to eternity.

Therefore fear none of the things appointed for you to suffer by the way. But gird up the loins of your mind, and hope to the end. Be not impatient, but wait humbly upon the Lord.

You have one hard lesson to learn, that is, the evil of your own heart. You know something of it, but it is needful that you should know more. For the more we know of ourselves, the more we shall prize and love Jesus and His salvation.

I hope what you find in yourself by daily experience will humble you, but not discourage you: humble you it should, and I believe it does.

Are not you amazed...