Where are ya from, mate? - July 15, 2010

Good Thursday morning! There I go again having trouble remembering what day it is. Oh,yeah, it's the day after I learned that our old Prestolite plant has changed hands one more time. I read that sometime in the fourth quarter, we will have a Tyco Electronics cabling plant in place of our Prestolite plant. Congrats to Jeff E. our soon to be Tyco employee. Over the years we have seen that plant sign change from Prestolite to Krone and then to ADC, as it is now. Soon we will see a Tyco Electronics sign out there I suppose. What's in the name? The first company was fairly small and specialized. The next one, Krone, had more business overseas and more products to go with the cabling. ADC added even more products, though they spun off some electronics lines that we once used at the Big C. (ADC Kentrox is one I recall by name.) Tyco Electronics is in to a lot of different things in telecommunications and electronics.

Back in the day, I would often run into all four companies at the same conference; soon they will be just one large corporation. One of the questions we often asked of the other conference attendees is the old "where are you from? Oh, do you know Joe Smith?" Insert whatever name you like for Joe Smith; we often tried to make some sort of personal connection to make people from far away seem not quite so far away from us. Of course seldom did the person from that far away city know the person we asked about. Today's verse is along those lines:

Philip was from Bethsaida, Andrew and Peter's hometown. (John 1:44)

At first glance this verse may seem only useful in Bible trivia contests, but we should look a bit deeper. This was personal information about three of the first disciples; this is a connection. I don't know how many people lived in Bethsaida back in the Jesus' time, but there is a chance that Philip, Andrew, and Peter at least knew each other by name, even if they were in different lines of work or only saw each other on the Sabbath. Just mentioning their hometown might give someone else a connection to them. Perhaps one of you has an ancestor who came from Bethsaida, or was a Roman officer stationed in that town. Or, like most of us here in the U.S., you have no idea if your ancestors in the first century even knew where Rome or Israel was or if those ancestors could read a map if they saw one. Some nations have a lengthy and detailed knowledge of their past; in the United States many of us don't have so much of that kind of knowledge.. .which might explain some our fascination with history and genealogy.

Connections in the Bible are important to us. We like to know where people live and come from. A hometown might say something about a person, even though generalizations are a bit risky. The region a person lives in might give some indication of their knowledge in some areas. A person raised in the desert southwest of America would reasonably be expected to know what a cactus is. A person from an Inuit town of the Canadian north would be expected to have a pretty fair knowledge of snow. More than likely that person could tell you much more than you want to hear about snow. We like those little tidbits of knowledge about people. "Where are you from?" is a standard question we ask of people we meet. We like to make connections with people. Jesus made quite a connection with me; I wonder where exactly He came from?

Have another great day in Christ!

Bucky