In 1982, I was a young airman with a wife and two young daughters aged 3 and under and no car, who had recently moved into our second apartment in Biloxi, MS. My wife and I had expressed rather ephemerally the idea of "getting back to church," primarily for the sake of our girls. Still, with no wheels, that was more lofty concept than plan. I was commuting to work on a rented bicycle, which was obviously never going to work for getting our family to Mass! Very much to my surprise, I ran into a friend from high school who was living in the same apartment complex. He had moved away for senior year and we'd lost touch - there was no such thing as the internet yet - and neither of us was aware that the other had joined the Air Force. One day soon thereafter I mentioned to Ken that we'd been wanting to attend Mass, and he soon invited me to ride along with him on a Saturday evening. At my first Mass in years, they announced that the parish was forming a contemporary music ensemble. "Hmm," I said to myself, "if I can just get myself committed to this group, I'll at least go to Mass every week." It seemed like just the sort of thing I needed to move from nebulous idea to actual practice.
I must have called the contact person and made arrangements to meet with the group. Details are sketchy. I didn't have an acoustic guitar, so I was strictly singing at first. I might have walked the first Sunday, but the bassist from the group agreed to start picking us up and giving us a ride on Sunday mornings, and not long thereafter my wife and daughters started having breakfast with the family of the ensemble's director. We were struck by how warm, welcoming and helpful everyone in the group was, a different experience from those I'd had in my childhood church, though that may have been rooted more in my mom's distance than the parish's. We'd eventually be in a position to purchase our own car, and soon my own spirituality was growing in ways that led me to have way more in common with this group of folks than I'd had previously. After a particularly uplifting conversion experience, we started meeting with the covenant community to which many of these same people belonged. Within a couple years, we were transferred to Dayton, where our family has lived since.
Ken served out his enlistment and left the service, and we lost touch with each other until reconnecting on Facebook just a couple years ago. It turns out that he comes to the area every year for a convention, and it has been nice to get reacquainted. His kids are about the age of our oldest grandsons.
Meanwhile, we'd had this experience (3rd paragraph) with other friends of ours whom we originally met in that parish in Biloxi. This happened in 2005; their grandson was born around the time of Hurricane Katrina, and Phil and Carol came to Dayton regularly for a couple years until their daughter and son-in-law moved away. We didn't see them for a couple of years after that linked blog post. Now, their daughter and son-in-law have since moved back to the area, joined our parish, and our middle daughter teaches the RE class of the grandson who was born shortly after we were reunited with them. We may have never even met Phil and Carol in the first place if it weren't for Ken. God seems to have ways of working things out, but they can often end up going very differently based on our choices along the way.
Carol is now in town for the birth of another grandchild in the coming week, the same weekend that Ken was in town for his annual convention. They both met up with us at 10:30 mass, and I got to share my respective stories of them, and introduce them to each other.
I imagine that was way cooler for me than it was for either of them, but I find the way God (or as Adam would conclude, random chance) has worked the threads of our lives together truly remarkable.
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