small worldliness

Interesting experience the other day. I go to a Belarusian gathering of believers and before meeting at the Table, they showed a short film clip about a guy who carries this card table around and sets up his own communion for passerbys, which is for the most part ignored or unnoticed. But this wasn’t even what struck me. As soon as they started playing the film, I knew exactly where this film was shot. It was shot in the historic downtown Annapolis, Maryland. None other than my college town. There was Stevens hardware on the corner, there were the boats at city dock, the market house behind the dock, there was the food court at the Annapolis mall, etc. Every place in this video I had been. Now how weird and random is this: I’m halfway around the world in a culture entirely other than my native country and culture and in this place, I find myself on a Sunday morning at a service entirely in the Russian language, watching a short video clip in a room full of Belarusians (with a few Russians, Chinese, Slovakians, Cameroonians, Nigerians, and the scattered Americans as well), and there we watch together scenes from a town that I once called home. The strangeness of the circumstance made me smile.