"Forward Motion..................."

Beth and I drove the back roads over to Walton yesterday afternoon, a small burg about twenty minutes south of here, its main claim to fame being Steven Cauthen, the last jockey to win the Triple Crown back in 1978. In 1973, the residents also initiated an annual “Old Fashioned Day”, a September event celebrating the county’s birthday, one where the store windows along that two mile stretch of Route 25 serving as Main Street are decorated with artifacts such as quilts, family heirlooms, and old photographs, some people in period costumes for a parade along with crafts, games, and live music. Urban sprawl is slowly beginning to swallow up that neck of the woods, the scenery one used to experience in Northern Kentucky greatly changed in the last six decades. Gardens and agricultural crops are now few and far between. It used to be that anyone owning a hundred square feet or so of open space was growing dinner in his back yard. Fields everywhere were alive with acres of corn and tobacco. As a teenager, I rode behind a tractor, seated not much more than two or three inches above the ground, distributing that latter commodity into a plowed furrow. I’ve topped it, cut it, and hung it in a barn, balancing myself in the rafters, every so often flicking a huge caterpillar off my sweaty shoulders. Hay was gathered in bales; and, for seventy-five cents an hours, I’ve both walked beside and worked atop some farmer’s flatbed in the heat of a hot summer’s day, stacking it five or six units high only to transfer it again to a loft or a stall. Any more machines simply roll it up into large cylinders that are left right where they’re created. It’s a different world out there… Memory, it seems to me, is more than just a bit of nostalgia. It is the nitty-gritty “nuts and bolts” of who we are, the forging of our identity, the journey, itself, in whatsoever fashion it comes to us, coupled with the genetics given us in the first place, along the way producing the existing product; and it being almost impossible to predict the outcome of any individual if we were to try and manipulate the process. All the more reason, then, for us to somehow know the eyes of Christ, to know the grace of Christ and look beyond the humanity in the other guy, all of us in this together and in need of His promise. A man can’t go back. What he has is the next step….. with Him.