So here’s a thing.

At each Girls of Grace event, Chris Wheeler gives an awesome talk about boys versus men, and waiting on the right guy, and he uses the comparison of beef jerky and steak. He tells the girls to “wait for steak.”

And, sorry if I’m ruining this for anyone, but he cooks a steak on stage during the event.

This is an important fact.

It’s a genius move as it fills the room with the scent of cooking meat and does a beautiful job of displaying the core of his message. [I salute you, Chris.]

I speak about two hours after Chris. So last Saturday in Charlotte, around 1pm I headed up to the backstage and waited on our production manager, Peter, to give me a microphone. [Which, I will tell you, is one of my favorite, if not my very favorite, things about Peter. He gives me a microphone whenever I want one. Well, I mean, not whenever. But I bet he would. I’ll test next time and let you know.] I sat my Bible down on a black podium, in the semi-dark, and used my iPhone screen to light my notes to review.

Minutes go by and I pick up said Bible and pen and the leather on my Bible is wet.

Yep. Wet, y’all. Wet.

“That’s weird,” I thought as I looked around, “there’s no water or anything.” And then the iPhone light shone onto my hands and the liquid was B-R-O-W-N.

All my gag reflexes were lined up and ready to party because I was like, “I’LL TELL YOU WHAT I DON’T KNOW, PETER AND ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN TO MY PANIC. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT BROWN LIQUID IS ALL OVER MY BIBLE AND HANDS AND INSIDE MY PEN CAP FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING EVER.”

And then, because I am a brave little soldier, I smelled it.

BEEF.

My hands, Bible, and pen all smelled of freshly cooked beef.

In the darkness, I had laid all my belongings into Chris’s steak juice that had, at some point in the morning, drained down from the ledge where the said steak must have sat after it was cooked and the juice flowed into a puddle on the podium. Being that the podium was black, I didn’t see it.

So with zero time to do anything about it, I walked on stage smelling like I just used my paws to massage a well-seasoned cow. And literally everything I had with me had been meat-slimed.

It kinda ruined my life.

I threw away that pen yesterday, because even three days later, it reeks of cooked cattle and as much as I appreciate the reminder to wait for God’s best in my life, I’d rather not smell it.

And that’s all I have to say today. Happy Thursday.