The other go to one of those music festivals that was fashioned after Woodstock.

Woodstock, I guess not everybody would necessarily know this is getting to be a pretty old phenomenon

it predates my life, but Woodstock was this outdoor music festival in my country, it's

kind of associated with the hippies. It was 1969 was Woodstock and through the 70s and 80s you

saw a bunch of these knockoffs where people tried to recapture the magic. There were more Woodstock events.

I remember in the 90s there was a return to Woodstock with all of the alternative rock people and

I just I don't know. I never had the same vibe, but there was a Christian version of this called

Cornerstone in Illinois that I used to go to and we're not talking about some urban fairground

with multiple stages and electricity and indoor plumbing kind of event. We're talking about

a Woodstock style event. I think Woodstock was a farm, right? So this Cornerstone thing was

like that and there are probably several of you listening right now who actually were there

with me and we bummed around or said hi or high five or Ron and youth group tripped together

or whatever. But one of the amazing things about that kind of a music festival is simply the energy

of having that many people bumming around in the woods at the same time, setting up

makeshift tent cities and getting by and resources are far away and limited so you just connect

with whoever you can connect with and swap things and even the sanitized Christian hippie version

at something like Cornerstone which was not entirely sanitized. You still get that buzz. You get

that feel of the weirdness of this event. It feels like something meaningful is happening simply

by merit of how irregular the behavior is to grab a bunch of people and just go out the woods together

and listen to things and see what happens. And likewise, I think there was something socially

more shocking about what we see happening in Matthew chapter 15 and really all of Matthew with

these spontaneous crowds showing up for Jesus but particularly right here, we're out in the desert.

...