The slim, dark-haired woman strode into the coffee shop and threw her arms around my friends and me. Though we’d gained weight and had gray hair, she called us by name: Edith, Donna, Karen, Bev, Gaylene, and Berniece. We six Mennonite women had come to Halstead, Kansas, to meet four of our former classmates who we had gone to music, gym, lunch, and library together with at Halstead Public School. That was over 50 years ago. Still, we connected.
One of our former classmates had lost her husband in 2023. Another’s grandson passed away only a short while before we met. A third cried because her sister’s cancer has metastasized. Sobriety replaced the foolishness of childhood as each of us recounted life’s journey in the years since we’d walked across the gym floor to “Pomp and Circumstance” at eighth grade graduation.
Skip forward to today’s worship at Sugar Hill Mennonite Mission in the heart of Harlem. I can confidently say that nowhere in the conference did such a diverse group meet to worship. (Ghana, Germany, Nepal, Nigeria, Maine, Michigan . . .) The pure Light of Heaven shone in the chapel as truth was preached and eager hearts drank from the well of living water.
Some of us sat in the backyard of the mission after lunch and listened to the cry of a seeking soul. The young woman with us softly prayed at one point when she wanted to explain what was happening in her life.
This past week I gathered with people from my childhood. Today, I met with these people of my present life in NYC. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to be touched by and to touch the lives of a multitude of customers. Each person placed in my life by God’s providence for such a time as this (Esther 4:14). Berniece
P.s. Edith Koehn Jesser, Donna Dyck Wedel, Bev Johnson Base, Karen Koehn, Gaylene Smith Koehn, and myself along with our husbands had an Airbnb in Newton, Kansas, for three nights. We six girls who went to grade school together live in six different states.
An Ordinary Life 