Brethren Foreshadowing

In the early 1990s I attended AWANA, a Brethren youth program, for a year or two. We sang songs about Sparky (the program mascot), played games, memorized Bible verses and earned jewels in our crowns. The crown was plastic and brown, just large enough to fit into the palm of an eight-year-old. The jewels, also plastic, were yellow, green, red and purple. I never did earn enough of them to fill up my crown.

Shortly into the second year I grew tired of the program so Mom stopped sending me. We packed away my Spark vest and for many years I thought little of it. At  age 20 I met Drew, at 21 we began officially dating and I married him a year later. A few years after the wedding one of our conversations somehow meandered onto the topic of AWANA.

"It was this weekly Bible-memorizing club thing," I began to explain.

He said, "yeah, that's a Brethren program. I was in that program, too." We didn't attend the same program at the same time, of course. He's several years older than me and we grew up in different countries. But I never thought he'd know anything about that program. I didn't even realize it was Brethren and the Brethren community is so well-connected that I wonder if some of the kids or adults involved in that program in Laramie might have known someone in Toronto back then who knew Drew's family.

It's entirely possible. A few years ago while we were traveling back from visiting my family in the States Drew struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in front of us on the bus. She was from Ottawa and a few minutes into the conversation Drew realized that a) they had an amazing number of friends in common and b) they had both attended the same Brethren church as children. They were probably childhood playmates.