Our Story: A volcano, Cotton Blossoms and Hokies

It's a bit surreal to revisit this humble little story called Our Story. I have been wanting to write the next chapter for a loonnnng time, and this December as I have committed to slow down, I saw the “to do” in my blog list on Asana to “Write the next chapter of Our Story.” My last entry was 2015 (and that was looking back at the closing months of 2008)!

Here’s a few caveats…

• For those of you new to my Substack, if you want to “catch up” on Our Story, it’s much easier done on my journeyguy.com site. Substack does not allow posts to be grouped in a series. So visit this link if you want to play catch up (Highly recommended. While these aren’t MCU-like episodes, I think you’ll at least be entertained, and perhaps you’ll become a friend).

• This series has been personal. It’s a story that tells of two college students who met, surprised one another with joyful friendship, married and have “journeyed” together through cancer, ministry, kids, churches and businesses, states and countries, all the while learning to reflect our faith. And yet, as personal as our story is, I hope you’ll catch glimpses that grip your heart and call you to faith in the ever-present, happy Savior that we’ve walked with along the way. His name is Jesus. Perhaps it will even prompt you to write your own story.

Where we left off

“In the last episode…” (at least that’s how I see the Netflix adaption of Our Story beginning each new show), we were experiencing restlessness in southeast Arkansas. We’d lived there for 14 years, pouring our lives into campus ministry and a church we’d launched in 2003. As 2008 concluded, we wondered if another life chapter was about to start. Our kids were nine and eleven. We had two dogs and a cat. I was a bivocational pastor, running a local news website called MonticelloLive.com as well as running Noble Design. Carolyn owned her own photography business, a Noble photo. We were planted in Monticello. We loved it. We weren’t looking, and yet, we just sensed God was “up to something.”

That’s when an old friend called one night in November 2008. Darrell Cook was the Baptist Collegiate Ministry Director at Virginia Tech. We’d met in 1995 when I went to be the BCM Director at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. Darrell was the former director at UAM, and as he made a transition to serve as the Associate Director at another campus, we met and over time became friends, as well as our families.¹ Darrell was then a member of Northstar Church in Blacksburg, Virginia. Their founding pastor had resigned, and Darrell had been placed on the pastor search team.

“Are you open to being considered for our pastor here in Blacksburg?” he asked.

In that conversation I was honest and disclosed to him the sense of restlessness. As I recall, I told him we wanted to pray about it for a few days. When I got back to him and shared that we sensed an openness to having our names submitted, he chuckled and confessed that he had already given our names to the team and that they wanted to meet me!

I flew up to Blacksburg early in 2009, and after meeting the people of Northstar Church, we wanted to move to a “next step.” That would mean that all of the Nobles would descend on Blacksburg, the home of Virginia Tech, for a weekend “in view of a call” as it’s known in Baptist circles.

But first, Alaska

In 2007 some of our dear friends and members of Journey Church in Monticello had sensed their own restlessness and calling. After weeks of prayer, they identified Alaska and Voice for Christ Radio Ministries as their own faith adventure. They had been there for over a year, and they had invited our family to come see them.

So in March 2009, the Nobles flew to Alaska. It was celebrating 50 years of statehood that year, having been the 49th state admitted to the U.S. We marveled at the majesty and wildness of Alaska. We crammed in a lifetime of winter fun into several days. We saw Mt. McKinley, sledded, rode snow mobiles, the rest of the family skied (I hate it), shoveled snow, and saw moose there, as common as deer in southeast Arkansas.²

When the day of our departure drew near, we got an alert from the airlines. Our flights would be postponed. A volcano was erupting near the airport, and the emission of gas and dust was dangerous for planes. That was a new one for us!

We spent several more days with the Hales family then. We all started to get stir crazy. I even helped Mike with a bathroom renovation project to try to earn our keep there. It started to get stressful when the daily postponements began eating into April. We were supposed to fly to Blacksburg at the end of May, and in the meantime, we had a mission trip to Poland to prepare for! We made it on the plane one day, only to learn that we’d have to deboard because the volcano had erupted an hour earlier, and due to shifting winds, the dust clouds were now over the airport. Back to the Hales for another evening.

At least we had a wonderful home and host family to stay with. By this time, the airport looked like a third world country, with people stuck there, sleeping in the hallways, anxiously wanting to be ready to fly out when intermittent flights were able to depart in breaks in the eruptions. When next we got the “all clear” to fly out, we trekked back. At our gate, we discovered that only three of the four of could board due to space. I sent Carolyn and the kids onto the flight, and prayed, hoping for a last minute stand-by option. Just as the plane completed boarding, my name was called!

My family’s eyes lit up when they saw me walk on the plane with just minutes before takeoff. I had to go standby to get on board with them.

As we prepared for takeoff, the pilot announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Redoubt erupted again 30 minutes ago.”

There was a collective intake of air as every passenger sucked in the oxygen around them. Would we be bumped again?

“But it shouldn’t affect us yet, so we’re cleared for takeoff.”

There was applause throughout the aircraft, and suddenly the two seatmates on either side of me that had been strangers moments before were now comrades. We chatted it up all the way to Chicago.³

The kids were sooooo happy to see our car in the airport parking lot.

To Monticello, then Blacksburg

My travel-weary family was able to unpack, sleep in our own beds, and experience the drastic climate adjustment from the snowy mountains of Alaska to the already-muggy spring days of southeast Arkansas. No more moose. Welcome back to the land of fire ants and mosquitoes.

We flew in to Roanoke the last weekend of May. It was a joyful, encouraging “meet and greet” with the people of Northstar. I preached that Sunday, and we toured the New River Valley, saw the home of the Hokies, enjoyed meeting the warm welcome and the wonderfully cooler climate. By the time we got home, we learned that the church had voted to call me as their next pastor.

Sam and Adelyn’s first picture with the Hokie bird!

We went up Roanoke Mountain and snatched this picture of us at the Roanoke Star from their webcam.

As the joy settled in on us about the upcoming transition to Blacksburg, we still had another adventure left. We still had final swim meets, baseball games, a massive yard sale, a float trip on Arkansas’ Buffalo River, and making see-you-later rounds on our schedules. Yet, a trip to Poland for Journey, the BCM and some college softball players was next.

Krakow, Poland

I had been to Poland in the summer of 2008 on a discovery trip with some Baptist campus ministers led by Ed Stetzer.⁴ When I got back to Monticello, I talked with Tracy Reed, the current director of the BCM at UAM about us taking a group of students and members from Journey Church the next year.

Our trip was planned for June 2009, in the middle of this crazy transition. What developed was humbling. Jeremy Woodall, one of my former students, was leading worship for us at Journey and dating one of the pitchers from UAM’s softball team. I “pitched” the idea to Becca of inviting her and some of her teammates to come to Poland with members of the church, and as they enthusiastically responded, our trip morphed into a VBS - Sports Clinic. I was thrilled to have Carolyn with me. It was our first international mission trip experience together!

There’s simply too much to share here, but go here and read more about our Poland Mission. Those girls hit a home run in Krakow. The mission team we connected with in Krakow had started a men’s baseball team, and those girls taught the team basic skills. It was hilarious watching those European guys eye the girls with such obvious disdain and skepticism. When the girls proceeded to strike them out and hit off their pitches (we played softball), their attitudes changed quickly!

Back to Monticello (again)

The rest of June and July were a hot whirlwind in Arkansas as we prepared for the huge move. I described the resignation here from Journey, and later that fall, I wrote Ode to Monticello (even a poem!). Arkansas was our home. We loved every part of it. Yet, we were humbly certain that God had called, and so the movers came from Virginia and were weather-shocked to find southeast Arkansas in the 100s that summer. It was a hot move.

On to Northstar

Members of Northstar met us at our rental house and helped us unload.⁵ I had my first encounter with honesty and spiritual lostness when we ordered pizza for all the helpers.

When the delivery guy arrived, I was the bubbly new pastor, and after paying and tipping, I eagerly invited the unsuspecting bearer of pizza to visit our church. His response surprised and delighted me.

“Church?! Naw man, I’m not into that.”

And he contentedly left. I watched him walk off. As I returned inside with the pizza, I shared how refreshing it was to have the guy honestly tell me that he wasn’t interested. It was an abrupt change from Arkansas, the buckle of the Bible Belt, where people would politely put you off with a “Thanks so much. I’ll think about it,” or a “My grandparents go to the Methodist church.” Those two deflections or something similar were how Bible Belters responded. Not so in Blacksburg.

For me, I was thrilled about the challenges and ministry ahead. For my family, we’d only just begun to discover all the ways Blacksburg would be “home” after knowing nothing but Razorbacks and sweet tea.

To be continued…

P.S. Read previous “episodes” of Our Story here.

1. You can read more about Darrell and how our friendship started here:

and here:

I began this post talking about Darrell recommending us to Northstar. This post from November of 2009 is a nice ending to a crazy year, with our family having a Thanksgiving breakfast with his family in Blacksburg:

2. If you’re curious about more of our adventure, I blogged nearly every day of the trip. It’s recorded in my Alaska Adventure series here.

3. From my entry, Final chapter.

4. Ed and I had met awkwardly, but we smoothed things over, and it was a delight to discover the ministry opportunities in Poland with him. See my Discouraged Pastor entry for what happened.

5. You can read about those early days in Settling into Blacksburg.