I’m not very active on Facebook, but sometimes I read the posts that others have made. One of my classmates from grade and high school is very active and makes a lot of nostalgia posts about the past. He will find an old class photo or an article from the newspaper, or a piece from an old yearbook and post it. Then the comments roll in from others. I haven’t done a very good job of keeping track of friends from that part of my life - I’ve been away from my home town for a lot of years and I’ve formed some really meaningful friendships with others along the way.

A week or so ago, he posted a set of answers to the question, “Where will you be 25 years from now?” that were in the 1990 high school yearbook. Some students had answered lightly, others had taken the question quite seriously. In a large part the answers were, I suppose, similar to the ones that might have been offered 45 years ago when I completed my high school career. The majority of the students predicted that they would live far from our home town. Some were going to California; some to New York or Paris; some to Hawaii; and one or two planned to live in Alaska. The majority believed that they would be living in a city much bigger than our home town. Like my classmates, the graduates of 25 years ago have scattered to many locations. A handful have remained in our home town, and a few more have lived in our home state for all of their lives. Some, like me, have lived in several different places over the years.

When we were high school students, we really longed to get away from our home town. Although we had had a good time growing up in a safe and loving environment in a time when considerable energy and investment was made in schools and other programs for children, we set our sights on getting away from what we saw as a place that was too small and too set in its ways for our futures to unfold.

Needless to say, we didn’t think of our little town as a place of innovation and ideas that were ahead of their time.

So, as the years have gone by, and I have returned to my home town to visit several times each year, it is interesting to see what has happened. Unlike some other small towns, our home town has not died up and become even smaller. New folks have moved into the houses that we used to live in, new homes have been built, new businesses have come to main street and there aren’t many, if any, vacant buildings in the downtown area. For a town of its size, it is a thriving place with an active history museum, art galleries, a movie theater, several cafes and restaurants, a good grocery store and other businesses and services. Almost all of the businesses that were active when we were kids have either moved to new locations or been replaced with other businesses. I don’t know many of the people that I meet on the street these days.

Yesterday, I noticed something at a thriving business that was a tiny rock shop in an open field when I was a kid. The original log cabin is dwarfed by the additions. There is a large sporting-goods section, a complete convenience store and deli and rows of gas pumps outside. And, alongside a fence, behind the gas stations, there are four charging stations for electric vehicles with modern signs designating it as a “Tesla 30-minute quick charge station.” I would have expected such a station in a large west-coast city. And, if you had asked me, I would have said that there would be one of those stations in my current town, which is 30 times the size of my home town, before you found one in the little town where I grew up.

But they have the right address. As the Tesla Motor Company expands its fleet of all electric vehicles and seeks to demonstrate their practicality for long-distance travel, they are establishing a series of charging stations spaced evenly along major highways. I suppose they started at the West Cost, perhaps Seattle, and chose locations that were within the range of the cars to establish the charging stations.

However, it happened, there is a small place of innovation where services for the future are being envisioned and offered today in my little home town. I’m pretty sure that no one in my home town owns a Tesla automobile, but my sister has reported seeing multiple cars stopped at the charging station.

Actually, when I looked it up on the Internet, the charging stations are more common that I expected. There is one in Butte, 150 miles to the west of our town and another in Billings, 80 miles to the East. And, yes there is one in Rapid City, on North Haines avenue. I just hadn’t noticed that they had installed the station. The network of chargers is more extensive than I had expected. Perhaps, my home town isn’t on the cutting edge of technology, but it hasn’t fallen behind the times as well.

It seems like a very nice place to live and I suppose that had I stayed there, I could have built a meaningful life. As it turned out, I wasn’t so much moving away from things, but rather being called to new adventures. I needed to leave town to pursue my education and when one serves the church one has to have the flexibility to go where the need exists, not choose the location first and then find a church job. And ours has been a full and meaningful life filled with good people with whom to share the ministries of the church.

I don’t think we were asked to make predictions about where we would be in the future by our high school year book. I’m sure that had we been asked, we would not have been accurate in our predictions.

On the other hand, things as they turned out have been as good as, or in most cases, better than what we might have imagined.

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