Cornerstone 1997: Overview

Well, where should I begin? In case you were wondering, Cornerstone is a Christian arts and music festival every year during the 4th of July weekend in Bushnell, Illinois. 150 or so Christian bands from all sorts of genres, seminars on a wide variety of topics, speakers, art exhibits, and fellowship draw about 20,000 people or so annually to this small Illinois town. This year, it drew myself and 8 of my friends.

I’m not going to bore you with the entire trip, with all of the little details. I’m not going to give you an hour by hour breakdown of our trip. Rather, I thought I’d give you some of my impressions about the festival, as well as some the highlights for me. If you want to know all of the gritty, juicy details, e-mail me and I’ll tell you more than you want to know.

Basically, we left from Lincoln, Nebraska around 12:30 or 1:00 on Monday, June 30 and arrived in Bushnell at about 10:30 that same night. After quickly setting up camp, we hit the hay. Since the festival didn’t start until Wednesday, we had basically had all of Tuesday to goof off. I spent most of the day reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, trying to stay cool, or looking for my friends from the Velvet Empire.

I finally hooked up with them on Wednesday, and the rest of the festival was spent just hanging out and having fun with them. They were some of the coolest people I met.

In my opinion, that was the coolest thing of the fest. The bands were great and wonderful, but by the time the fest was done, I was so tired and run down that I couldn’t get into the shows. Having really bad allergies didn’t help with that, either. But, I got to meet so many wonderful people. That was probably the greatest thing of the fest, for me.