Roll on

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Home in Michigan. Tested Dad's Canon S2 - awesome. Play hours on guitar daily. Birthday balloons floating behind me. Sufjan Steven's "Avalanche" outtakes - great. Liz and Luke (sister and her husband) staying till Monday.

I have a friend named Mark Bolser. Or, had. I'd like to go looking for him. Today we watched "The Labyrinth," a David Bowie movie which Mark brought over and we watched at my house several years ago. He gave me the book "No Compromise", the biography of Keith Green. It had a huge effect on me. He then introduced me to Keith's music. On my myspace profile, I wrote this concerning who I'd like to meet:

"Mark Bolser. He was three years older than me, and was my number one friend and mentor in high school. One day, two weeks after he graduated, his grandma died. She was the only Christian in his family. He had grown up in foster homes, and she had been the only person who had loved him throughout his lifetime. He left all of a sudden, gave up on Christianity and disappeared somewhere in Detroit. Someday I'm going to find him."

Today a reliable source said he had overdosed and was dead, but the source can't completely confirm it.

One time at Cedar Point, after getting out of the car, my sister banged his head in the van door (double dutch-door style). He was out of it for a couple minutes, and was just following off and when Liz turned off to go into the ladies bathroom he wasn't paying attention and followed her in. It was the funniest moment of the trip.

I was with Mark when he became a follower of Christ. Whether he is dead or alive, I know that what happened to him was real. In earlier years, he went through things most of us can't imagine. I guess something broke him. No one is really to blame, but some environments just aren't able to help some people in the ways they need it. Mark may be a broken man, may even be a dead man, but I am going to see him again some day.