When I was teaching high school Spanish at a Christian school in Lincoln, Nebraska, I started a Spanish club with the intention of traveling for the dual purpose of further teaching the kids Spanish and culture as well as mission exposure. Many of these kids had hardly set foot outside Nebraska!
I told you about our first trip to South Texas and Mexico before. The second trip was to Guatemala. One of the days we stayed at the center for Wycliffe missionaries in Guatemala City. While there we attended a meeting for the missionaries in the area. The couple who led part of the meeting and took prayer requests looked really familiar, but I didn’t know why. Afterward they came and told me that they recognized me from my boarding high school. They were the parents of a couple of my classmates. One of the years they had been on furlough and lived in town so we saw a lot of them that year! Who would have thought that I would run into them in Guatemala ten years later!
After the same meeting we stood around and visited with some of the missionaries. As I was talking, I mentioned that my grandfather had been a missionary in Guatemala and that my mother had gone to boarding school in Guatemala. This got the attention of one of the ladies who began asking me more questions. As it turned out, she knew my family and was one of my mom’s classmates at boarding school in Guatemala over forty years before! I couldn’t believe it!
Just a small correction. Your grandfather worked in Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua. He visited all the countries in Central America and probably spoke in all of them at one time or another. I lived those places with my parents and went to the school for missionaries’ children in Guatemala. Your father and I lived in Costa Rica for a year and a half. We lived in Mexico City for six months during the Olympics of 1968. Then we moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, where you were born. We have been in the Valley longer than in any other place I have lived in my life. You never know who you might meet from your past life, mine, and especially if you go back to your grandparents! Yes, it’s a small world!
There we go! And yes, the story was indeed completely true yesterday …