Six months after we moved here I was going to a little place I’d come to love to get my weekly frappuccino. Before I could put my order in, the young lady at the window asked me if I’d like my usual. Whoa! You mean you actually remember a favorite of mine? You know me?!
This took a little bit for me to get over, considering I was raised in the Central Valley of California where city meets city in amongst the freeways. Yet even with its many more people than my Bonners Ferry, I still love my California. It was the place of my childhood and many precious memories.
However, when my family moved to a farming community in Indiana from big-city California, I thought I was downsizing quite a bit. This was now redneck country where overalls were considered proper attire at a wedding and a third mode of transportation, besides your car and bicycle, was your tractor.
But then we moved to Bonners Ferry and small-town kept getting smaller. I have to wonder that should God move us somewhere yet again and considering our past record of down-sizing, I’m expecting the place to have a population of maybe 20.
It might be small here, but I love it! Where else do you have librarians who know you by name and also have the stickers ready, knowing your children love to reach for them? Or your local grocery store baggers are so friendly you actually know one of them had a homebirth just like you?
And you know the FedEx man has become a part of the family when you get home one day to find a box on the porch with the words “Happy Thanksgiving” handwritten and signed by him. He is also the one who can chat up to 20 minutes and you know when he’s on a diet, yet he’ll still take some of your cookies home to his wife.
As for the frappuccino lady, she has now become such a good friend that I was invited to her baby shower. After the baby arrived, we took her a meal and while there, my youngest decided to puke all over her clean kitchen. She was as sweet as could be and it hasn’t ruined our friendship to this day!
You holler hello to your midwife across the grocery store parking lot and watch her eyes light up when she sees it’s you. You can spout the phone numbers of both the courthouse and the family doctor at any given moment. At the little variety store, the cashiers grin and count as they watch you and your five children come through their doors and say, “The kids just keep on coming, don’t they!”
No matter where you live, remember that God put you there. He has called some to big cities and some to little towns, but everywhere you will find His Remnant. Little dots of righteousness across the landscape of not only America, but the world.
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deborah says
So true! It is special to have small town relationships!