I thought I’d finish out the month with a little ‘small world’ story that happened just this past Sunday. We worshipped at the church where we are serving this month (Dothan Community Church) and as often happens, the pastor asked us to stand and introduce ourselves. We obliged with our standard “We raised our family in Pennsylvania, but we’ve been on the road for 17 years now, so we’re pretty much from everywhere and nowhere.” The service continued on, and afterwards many folks came up and greeted us, warmly welcoming us to DCC and thanking us for the work that we would be doing. As Gary and I were heading out, one sweet lady came up and asked where in PA we were from, since she also was from Pennsylvania. We fine-tuned our geographic area and she said she was from the Harrisburg area.
“Oh, where abouts,” I asked.
“North of Harrisburg, actually. I live in Perry County.”
“Wait. Perry County? My sister lives in Perry County!”
(For those of you non-Perry Countians, it’s a very beautiful rural area with more farms that industry and at my last count, one traffic light.)
At which point, the dear lady said, “I thought you looked familiar – are you Joie’s sister?”
“Well, yes I am!” came my astonished reply!
It turns out Sue(from Perry County)’s sister is married to Chester who is our ‘boss’ on the job here at DCC! She was down visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. What a lovely totally unexpected surprise – and delight! We spent the next 10 minutes or so tracking down connections – it’s possible that we had even met many (many) years ago as they had gone to the same church as Joie & Fitz ‘back in the day’.

I suppose it’s a small thing – running into someone in Alabama who knows someone you love in Pennsylvania. But it felt pretty big on that Sunday morning when in that sea of all new faces, someone thought my face looked familiar. And it was!

Thanking God for his kindnesses – big and small! I just love how He is a God of details!