Be Rich in Memories and Poor in Regrets

 
“I thank my God in all my remembrance of you.”  1 Peter 3:1  This past weekend I reconnected with my childhood once again when the SC Baptist Singing Churchmen sang at Crestview Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio.  My childhood from ages 3 to 14 covered 1960-1971 with friends who hold a very special place in my heart to this day.  But the experience is the closest thing to time travel I can imagine.  My formative years were bottled up for storage when my family moved away from Dayton to West Columbia, SC when as I was 14 years old.   So, all of those memories and feelings connected with Dayton were just frozen in time for me and very capsulated in my brain.  The people that were very much a part of my life were suddenly gone and new people, places and experiences took their place.  I have only returned to Dayton for brief, yet intense visits three times since 1971: In 1985 when I took my youth choir from Virginia to sing, in 2006 for the church’s 50th Anniversary Sunday, and now in 2015 with the Singing Churchmen.   The faces I see are older, as is my own to them as well.  But the love and mutual thankfulness for those “wonder years” is so powerful because they truly were times filled with (pardon the alliteration) a lot of love, laughter, and learning to live life in a lasting relationship with the Lord!



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