Small World Moments

On facebook it's not all that surprising that you have a "small world moment" as your network is usually populated by people who run in the same circles as you and often may have some of the same friends even if you've never encountered the two of them in the same setting...but every once in a while you have a genuine small world moment where two tiny networks connect.
I had two in less than a week. In my Adult life I've been a part of small towns mostly with large distances between them. The first happened when PJ and I stopped at a yard sale in Portersville PA, to buy some ridiculously large posters of superheroes for an event later in the fall at the ROCK. The guy who sold them to us was none other than the cousin (Fathers were brother's) of our police chief in Oakdale.
The second was more obscure. I attended a conference for pastors and church leaders yesterday and I, out of character for my "ghost rat" self, invited myself to sit at a table with an older gentleman who I found out was a pastor from somewhere here in the Western PA area. As we talked about where we'd lived and worked I mentioned that I had come back to Pittsburgh after a period of years that took me from Virginia to Kentucky to Kansas "with a brief stop in Indiana." "where in Indiana?" he asks. Sure he would not know the town I said "a little town called Monroe City, near Vincennes." Vincennes being the only recognizable feature on the map since Monroe City could be mistaken for a cigarette ash or pepper flake on the map. His eyes lit up. Turns out his wife was from Monroe City and "was saved" in the Church of Christ there. Here I had lived there a whole year and a half and yet such features as the logo PJ and I designed for the community center there were recognizable to him.
Amazing that it truly is a small world.
If there is any point to this story it also surprised me how easily we talked and recognized each other's common call to ministry when at the time I lived in Monroe City the only Church that wanted nothing to do with us an didn't even recognize our common status as Christians was the Church of Christ. What a difference distance makes. I imagine in heaven we'll have a lot more small world moments where what unites us (Jesus) matters more than those things that divide us.
In Christ and on the Shepherd's Path,
Mark