10/29/2022 - This post is more inspired by my journal entry from July 3 than it is a transcription of one as my previous blog posts have been.
Sunday, 7/3, 11:35a - “Love rooted in Christ” 2Timothy1:13
Live! From Martinsville. Drove up from Bryson City yesterday to meet Mom and Dad...
and his youngest brother and his wife in Floyd, Va, at their place on land nestled in the mountains along the Blue Ridge Parkway, land where Dad and his brothers' mom and grandma grew up. I only remember going up there a time or two as a kid and not often at all as an adult until recently. One thing I do remember about being up there as a kid is sunshine dappling through the leaves on an old dirt road with a barbed wire fence and rough cut timber as fence posts, faded gray, and a creek running along the road and picking wild blackberries off a thorny vine stretching toward the road. I was a city kid, so eating something right off the vine or branch or stalk seemed a bit magic to me: blackberries in the wild, cherries and cherry tomatoes growing in the backyard at Papa and Grandma’s.
The vines and weeds, bushes and brush left to grow unchecked have now crowded the stream, grown up around the old homestead, and choked away the blackberries and apple trees, though there’s still fruit if you look…and if the birds, bear, and deer haven’t beaten you to it first. Nevertheless, that land has become - if it ever stopped being in the first place - holy ground to me. Maybe not exactly like the Moses and the burning bush, voice of God, take off your shoes kinda way, but there is very much a connectedness and rootedness that’s bigger than me.
“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” the book of Hebrews says, “let us throw off every weight and sin which so easily entangles and run with perseverance the race marked out for us”…it’s like that kind of holy ground. And the voice of God comes whispering through the great pines and ancient oaks, and it comes soughing through the tall grass in the fields that haven’t been overrun and overgrown. And you feel so small and so powerful all at the same time, like, here you could bare your soul and accomplish anything. And maybe that’s just what holy ground is, a place where you can lose yourself in the freedom of being laid bare without judgement and where the stories and the people who’ve gone before you and whose threads are connected to you still thrum within. It’s a place where God can and does speak across the generations and remind us who he is…present, faithful, over all, in all, through all; and who we are…loved, held, sent, forgiven, child of God.
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