Connections

Seeing how God connects us from around this wide world just blows me away! I've been meeting people from all around the world...worshipping with them, learning from them, partaking of a wide variety of their cultural cuisine, gaining new insights about their countries and cultures...It's been quite the experience!

Here was one experience that amazed me a couple days ago...

I was talking with a young woman named Iris who has recently started attending ICF Padova. In getting to know each other, she told me she was from Switzerland.

The funny thing was, just a couple days before this, I had asked my Grandma Marilyn to tell me more about where our ancestors came from. Grandma told me that her dad's family had immigrated from Switzerland, and that they spoke Swiss-German. Their last name was Stockli. One of her dad's American schoolteachers actually changed his name to Stackley, "to be spelled like it sounds". Grandma said that several of her relatives have done some research and discovered the name Stockli to be quite common there in Switzerland.

I was telling Iris all of this...and she immediately recognized the Stockli name. She was helping me pronounce it correctly! :) She explained to me that the o has the 2 dots over it...I forget what that's called. She said it's hard because we don't have a letter that makes this particular sound in English...which is probably why that teacher just decided to change his name here in America. Crazy! As Iris and I were discussing all of this and she was giving me a pronunciation lesson, she suddenly exclaimed, "You know what?!" (And yes, she speaks great English! Praise the Lord, I can communicate with her!) I replied, "What?!" She then proceeded to explain to me how in Switzerland, when a baby is born, they take the baby to a church to have them baptized...kind of...not really a full baby baptism or anything. I think from what she was explaining, it's like a birth certification of sorts...she explained that you have a man and woman there who aren't your parents, but if anything ever happened to your parents they would take care of you. I took it to be like what we would call "godparents". She was explaining all of this to tell me that her "godparents", the couple who was there with her parents when she was born (they are close friends of her family), that their last name is Stockli! Isn't that just crazy cool?! I thought so! Even if they aren't officially related to us somehow, meeting her was just amazing! Thank you, Lord, for such an incredible opportunity! While here, I've been reminded just how big the world is...but also it has seemed a bit smaller through experiences like this one. What a blessing!

"Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised! His greatness is beyond our understanding!"

Psalm 145:3