“Do you welcome strangers into your life? Explain or illustrate.”

This is the Barclay Press Express Yourself question this week. Sometimes the stranger isn’t really a stranger. Saturday night I was sitting in the ambulance passenger seat in Caldwell, Idaho. My dad was in the back with two EMTs. The driver was the third EMT. I was 400 miles from home and, of course, had never seen these three men before they came to my dad and step-mom’s home 30 minutes earlier—and had no reason to see them again after going the short distance to the hospital.

This was not an emergency transport with sirens and a wall of silence between the drive and passenger seats would not serve my needs at the moment. We quickly stumbled into mutual connections. The superintendent of the Friends churches in the Northwest (with his office across the street from mine) was his pastor years ago at Homedale, Idaho, and the woman he is dating would have been a student at Newberg High School at the same time my oldest son was there.

It’s great fun to discover that the “stranger” isn’t.