It's A Small Small World After All

Pastoral Pondering
by Pastor Keith Larson

We attended the President’s dinner at Wartburg Seminary last Sunday night. An international student led the table prayer. Toromare Mananato is a student at Wartburg from Madagascar. I visited with her afterwards. Her hometown is southern Madagascar where we lived. I mentioned I had just missed a reunion of missionaries in St. Paul last week. She started naming missionaries who had taught her in bible school in the years past. She mentioned one couple quite fondly. They were the parents of some of my students. I just connected with one of them this last week. She currently lives in Norway. I told Toromare I had just exchanged notes with their oldest daughter, and Toromare said, “Oh Marta! When I was married, I wore her wedding dress.”

Earlier at the same dinner, we were sitting next to a couple from Ohio. He was a recently retired pastor. We were talking about places we had been and I said I had been pastor in Pontiac, Illinois and he said his bother had been pastor in Pontiac too. Ginger and I looked at his name tag, and together we said, “Oh, you are Gabe’s brother.” Gabe was pastor in the neighboring church who drove out into the country to visit me on my first day in my office as a new pastor. He “took me under wing” as a new young pastor, became my pastor and later I literally became his pastor when he resigned at his congregation and joined our congregation. As I spent days this week sharing with other intern supervisors recalling ministry experiences, I was glad to have had a chance earlier to fondly remember Gabe.

I constantly am amazed at how small the world is. Wherever I go, I run into people who know people who I know. It reminds me even more that when we were baptized, we were baptized into a family significantly larger than the family of our birth, significantly larger than even our congregational family. I have been blessed with the chance to live in many places and have had opportunity to develop deep connections with many people as pastor, teacher, co-worker and fellow community member. But it is the same for each of us. In baptism, we become intimately connected with new brothers and sisters throughout the world. Even if we do not know them personally, we become yoked with them in their joys and sorrows, in their hopes and in their dreams. That is why story elsewhere in The Star, about the Lutheran woman in prison in Iran is significant. We may not know her personally, but somehow, just knowing she is a graduate of one of our Lutheran colleges, she becomes much more like us and our children and grandchildren.

It is indeed a joy and a privilege when the term “brothers and sisters in Christ” means indeed what is says and we can count a world full of people as our brothers and sisters.