Serendipitous Café Meeting

Before visiting the first of our handful of potential church families this morning, we decided to investigate a café in a neighboring town for breakfast. The Sun, in Sunninghill (not to be confused with Sunningdale, where we live, or Sunnyvale, California, where we lived for ten years 1995-2005).

As we sipped our hot chocolates and espresso, and nibbled on our quiche lorraine, croissants (surprisingly good), pain au chocolat (doesn't matter that it was spelled incorrectly, it was fresh out of the oven), doughnuts and apple strudel, another family of four walked in and ordered. They sat down at the next table and we couldn't help but steal glances at them:

- The father carried a laptop (this made us feel bonded already).
- The mom and kids were blonde (we are too). I don't remember the color of the dad's hair, perhaps light brown.
- There was a boy about Jason's age, and a girl a little older than Emily.
- Then we overhead their American accent.

Since we don't know a soul here, on the way out, I had to initiate a brief conversation with the pick-up line of "Excuse me, but is there wireless internet access here?" (something I would have dearly wanted to know anyway, since we are still on dial-up for another week or so).

It turned out we had a mind-blowing amount in common with this family, in addition to the above four items:

- They moved here this week.
- Their kids will attend the same school as ours.
- Their son will be in Jason's grade.
- They are not only from the U.S., but from California. Not only from California, but Northern California. From Silicon Valley. Menlo Park, to be exact.
- Their kids went to International School of the Peninsula, where our kids went to a summer French immersion camp.
- They have lived in France (for six years; in fact their kids were born there).
- They have lived in additional countries (Netherlands).
- They have a VW (we had a VW in California, and again in France; we don't have a car yet here).
- They thought breakfast at the Sun on Sunday morning would be a good idea.

Wow! So we exchanged information and hope to get together soon to get to know each other better. Thanks, God!

Then we went to church and had a great time - the kids both loved their classes, and there's a youth group meeting Wednesday night for Jason (and this church is 8 minutes from our house! We've never had anything that close before). We still have about four other good possiblities, so we will probably visit those as well.