A few years ago, my brother, sister and I made a trip to our grandparent's old home place in a tiny town in the center of Alabama. It had been years since any of us had been back to this place we used to visit every summer and, in all honesty, it was never a place I loved going. The crickets were huge, there was no running water, baths were taken in the river and an outhouse was not a place you wanted to visit in the middle of the night.
My grandparents owned 200 acres of pine trees.....oh ya....and a creek that ran right through the middle. For as long as I can remember, my grandfather in his striped overalls and his train engineer cap, along with my grandmother in her long dress with an apron....yes...always with an apron....would drive the old pickup truck down to Blue Creek and pan for gold with their grandchildren hanging out the bed of the truck. For my siblings and cousins, this was like going to Disneyland. For Liz, it was pure torture.
But along the orange-clay dirt road to the creek, we would always pass an old wood-frame Methodist church with a cemetery next to it. My grandparents would eventually be buried in that very cemetery and the memory of a bee flying up my niece's skirt during my grandmother's graveside service will always be with me, but the thing about that old Methodist church I will remember the most is driving by it on Sundays and hearing the black people singing from the top of their lungs. Not a shy or embarrassed bone in their bodies......they loved the Lord and they wanted everyone to know it.
And as my siblings and I drove up that old orange-clay dirt road once again a few years ago, I SWEAR..I could still hear them singing. The church has long been abandoned, the windows broken out, the grass was taller than the tombstones and a mild wind could blow the walls down. But as I walked into this room full of memories, I found this old Methodist hymnal laying open on the floor, partially eaten by rats and laying among piles of old bulletins from 1979....opened to Page 285, "The Mystery of Grace".
And I smile as I think about that person who, so many years ago, set that hymnal down on the wood plank floor, just for me to find today.
Aww....the Mystery of Grace.
" But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
2 Corinthians 12:9
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