My wife and I had an interesting experience yesterday. Before I go there, though, a little background would be in order...

Over the summer of 1981, Brenda and I travelled as part of a Christian musical group known as the Continental Singers. We were part of Tour G (one of about 15 tours tours that summer), a group of roughly 40 high-school and college young adult vocalists, instrumentalists and techs who gathered in CA early in the summer to learn a 75 or 80 minute program that we shared across the US and, for a couple of weeks or so, in Great Britain. It was a wonderful summer, and as much as I enjoyed going overseas, one of my favorite parts of the whole endeavor was seeing parts of our own country that I'd never seen.

As best I can recall, it must have been the latter half of July or so when we did a concert in a place called East Liverpool, OH. For whatever reason, I remember that stop better than most. I think we may have been there for a Saturday night and a Sunday morning (a longer stop than most), and I remember that we stayed with the pastor and his wife (family?) in a house right behind the church. It was an area that had seen some tough times, but I remember our visit there very positively.

Two years ago, we moved to OH, and I'd repeatedly seen signs pointing toward East Liverpool. So yesterday afternoon, we finally decided to make the trek down that way. It was only about a 40 minute drive, but it took us back a lot farther than that! Fortunately, I had the impression that it was a Christian Church, so I Googled "First Christian Church East Liverpool, OH." (I also recalled the church being right downtown). We programmed the resulting address into our Garmin and drove straight to the church we'd last seen over 28 years ago!

From the outside, anyway, things didn't seem to have changed that much. The town seemed to have endured some more tough times since our last visit, but the church appeared to be in very good repair. The very fact that it still seems to be a very viable congregation in such a difficult environment was an encouragement to us.

I'm still not sure why it was so important for me to go see it again. Maybe it was partly the challenge to see if we could find it (which I don't think we would have without Google and the Garmin). I think it was also something in me that just wanted to see if a congregation in which we'd made a very small, albeit meaningful, investment was still there. Maybe it's my age, and I'm looking more intently than ever at what kind of difference I've made with my life. Whatever the reason, though, I'm really glad we took the time to do it. I wonder what other things from my past need to be tracked-down?