Where It All Begins

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One year after our first Hearts at Home conference, I found myself driving across town alone in my filthy minivan filled with car seats and five weeks' worth of Sunday school papers. I was having a conversation with God about the unexpected place He had me. I was leading a moms group in our church that had held what was supposed to be, a one time conference for moms. We expected 400 moms to attend and 1,100 showed up. It seemed that God's vision was much bigger than mine. We were now within a few weeks of our second conference and over 2,800 women had already registered to attend! We had assembled a board of directors, incorporated as a nonprofit, and were growing faster than I felt I could keep up with.

"You have to be laughing, God," I exclaimed with a mix of humor and resignation. "You now have me leading a huge ministry to moms and I DON'T EVEN LIKE WOMEN!"

I'm a late bloomer when it comes to female relationships. Growing up, most of the kids in our neighborhood were boys. My two sisters and I played softball with the neighborhood guys in the empty lot next to our house nearly every night during the spring, summer, and fall. Even though I went to all twelve years of school in the same school district, I never had one girlfriend who was my "best friend since first grade" as some people have.

I did have friends who were girls. I went to a few birthday parties and sleepovers over the years. Some girls eventually moved into the neighborhood and we had fun together ... playing baseball in the side lot. I also had some girlfriends I ate lunch with in high school.

Maybe it was growing up in a neighborhood of boys, or maybe it was being attracted to the simplicity of guy friendships, but female friendships weren't exactly a priority for me. I liked my guy friendships because they seemed to be less complicated. These weren't boyfriends ... just guy friends who didn't get their feelings hurt easily, communicated at face value, and protected me fiercely. They were more like the big brothers I never had.

I met some friends late in high school and I spent a year living in a sorority my freshman year of college (that, honestly, never really met my friendship expectations), but I never seemed to really "click" with the whole girlfriend thing in my younger years. While I privately longed to have girlfriends to share secrets with, laugh together, and talk on the phone for hours, I summed it up