A Place Where the Pavement Ends (Title stole from Jim Kelly)

I slept late and am now sipping coffee. The cats are holding me down while I muse over last night. The musing is good.

We are holding revival services at Centerville Baptist Church. Come out tonight at 7:00 pm. Decide ahead of time that you are in no hurry because we will feed you and be friendly with you after the preaching and praying stops. You can find us on Airport Road. Turn off Highway 82 at the foot of the hills like you are going to the airport. Cross the bridge and take the first road to the left. It will go straight up the hill. Follow that road about four miles and you will come to one of the prettiest little country churches you ever saw.

My wife and I drive in a different way, from Humphrey Highway. We love the turn off the pavement onto a gravel road and the transition to a different world. Thursday evening, that turn greeted us with freshly harvested delta fields, ground recently plowed where corn grew and big round bales of cotton where those mechanical monsters did their work not long ago.

The dust behind us boils up like smoke from a raging inferno. We pass the fields and come to the pasture where sheep lie on God's green grass and babies dot the flock. Their beauty and innocence is astounding. I lower the window and call them babies as we pass. 

Soon we see a deer with her fawn cross the road. Trees bordering our gravel path are slightly showing signs of the fall with tiny tinges of yellow on the edge of their leaves. The gravel road winds and rises into the hills. Another momma deer and her baby cross ahead of us and run swiftly away.

We arrive at the church to a silence that is a salve to the soul. This is "a place where the pavement ends" as Jim Kelly, our evangelist, called it in a recent video he posted on Facebook. People begin to drive up. These are folk of a simple faith. This is unadorned society, unpretentious people, real people who attend church cheerfully.

The cemetery across the road adds to the charm with its tombstones that rise from the high ground like sentinels as part of God's "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1). The grass is still green but its growth slowed of late by the dryness, lengthened nights, and cooler evening temperatures. The giant oak in the Church's front lawn is an open house for birds and squirrels and a testimony of the creativity and kindness of the God we worship.

I stand on the lawn and am thankful, honored to be the pastor here, amazed at God's unforeseeable plan. We go inside. We sing. Brother Jim preaches. We pray in the alters. The congregations slowly slips away. I go outside in the darkness and the silence has been replaced by a gentle but powerful music. The night air has a nip but the sounds of summer still seep from the woods adjoining the church lawn. Crickets and tree frogs, and katydids sing while and angles of God direct the unnoticed choir. 

Praise God forevermore.

NB. Jim, I stole you words, "a place where the pavement ends." You can pray for me tonight.