What a small world! My parents and I were at a little country restaurant in the middle of nowhere, attached to a butcher shop called De Koning Meats, near Jarvis/Port Dover. (Wednesday afternoons they offer a special roast beef dinner for five dollars.) The restaurant was packed with patrons and summer cottagers from Port Dover.

 

We saw a group of seven people come in and take two tables, but didn't pay attention. Much to our surprise, two of the people came to our table while we were eating our homemade beef vegetable soup.

Turns out, the people are almost like family to us. The great-grandfather, Les, now deceased, had worked as our farm foreman for 40 years. His son Reg grew up with my father and is a close friend of my dad's. Reg's son Steven Willson, his wife Jacquie (DeBoer) and three teenaged daughters had just flown into Toronto a couple of days earlier from Tokyo. They are missionaries who work at the Christian Academy in Japan, where Jacquie is the director and Steve is the property manager.

They came home to Ontario for a short unplanned furlough this summer to get away from the stresses of the tsunami that had plunged Japan into a lengthy crisis. By pure coincidence, the Willsons came for the roast beef special before heading to the family cottage on Lake Erie for a few days of much-needed R&R.

Having heard a great deal about Steve and his family, but not having seen them in years, our conversation was a delight.

During the tsunami and radiation crisis in Japan my mother was fervently praying for a young cousin on her side of the family, Keri, from Seattle, Washington, who married a Japanese-American Christian named Richard Nakamura. Richard, Keri and their five children are serving as missionaries in Tokyo.

Richard mentioned in one of his emergency prayer letters that he barely had enough gas left in his car's tank to get his oldest children home from the Christian Academy the day the tsunami hit and Tokyo traffic was gridlocked. We made inquiries, and only then realized that the grandson and great-grandchildren of the man who had worked his whole life on our rural southwestern Ontario farm were actually good friends with my mother's relatives from Seattle, thousands of miles away in Tokyo!

Of course, they had absolutely no idea they had one common denominator (in addition to their shared Christian faith) — the Nelles and Miles pioneer farming families in Ontario. Kind of a Six Degrees of Separation thing.

I went to my parents' car to get Hot Apple Cider and A Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider to give as gifts to Steve, Jacquie, Lauren, Rachael and Caitlin. I asked if they had room in their suitcases for a little piece of Canada. They said they already had book one (I vaguely recall sending one over in 2008 when Steve's parents flew to Japan to visit) but they were delighted to get book two. They all plan to read A Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider, then they will donate it to the library at the Christian Academy in Tokyo. (As a matter of fact, a tired missionary needing some encouraging stories of hope is probably reading A Second Cup with his feet up at the cottage right now.)

Finally, the Willsons' eldest daughter Lauren will move from Japan to Ontario to attend Redeemer College in Ancaster this September, and was very keen to hear about the evening school writing course that N. J. Lindquist will be teaching there this fall, where I will be the guest teacher on November 2.  (Of course, last year's writing course at Redeemer College was where Mary Ann Benjamins heard about The Word Guild and Hot Apple Cider for the first time, and decided to write and enter her true story. Her chapter "Holding God's Hand" was only the second time she'd been published in her life, and she is now working for The Word Guild!)

Further proof of our small world and divinely-orchestrated "coincidences"… and A Second Cup is enroute to Tokyo.