Things that matter

This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls…”  –Jeremiah 6:16a (NIV)

The following is an op-ed piece written by Leon Hale, first published in The Houston Post on Thursday, February 27, 1964 (edited for length). Charlie Lamb was 82 at the time. Charlie Lamb was my great-grandfather, Papa Lamb. I found the article while I was helping clean the garage of my dad, one of the finest, most consistently godly men I’ve known. He’s 82 now. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants….

You don’t very often find the door of a country church locked. I think the absence of a lock on the door of a church adds a lot to the place, though I’m not sure how to describe it. The Evans Chapel Methodist Church is a white frame building that stands by a curve in Farm Road 977. There’s a cemetery out behind the church that looks almost like it’s been swept with a broom, and a sign on the gate says, “Directory in church by front door.”

The directory is a few sheets of paper tacked to the wall and it shows who is buried where in the cemetery. Without knowing why, I stood there and turned the pages and studied the names, and thought about how most all those people sat in that church on many Sundays, and gave their money to build it, and worked to support it, and now it stands there by the side of the road and offers an open door to any man that wants to come in, day or night.

I drove back up the road about half a mile and stopped at a house by the road to ask for directions. An elderly man named Charlie Lamb came out on the porch and shook my hand and asked me in. I’d never met him and he’d never met me, but he pulled me in by the fire to meet Mrs. Lamb and gave me the choice seat and we talked for half an hour. The Lambs are members of the Evans Chapel church, and Lamb himself taught long ago in a one-teacher school that stood just across the road from the church.

“I can remember sitting in that school with a first grader on my knee, teaching him to read,” Lamb said, “and watching out of the corner of my eye while a big boy in 10th grade worked his geometry on the board.” Lamb said it was hard to tell how high a grade he taught, since teaching has changed so much since those days.

Mrs. Lamb told about her 10 children, and where each one of them lived, and how three of her sons made preachers and another was studying to be one. And they were all raised right there in that house, and now they’re all gone out on their own.

Lamb told about the time he came courting to that house, long years ago, and how he parked his buggy under a mulberry tree out front, and how the ripe berries fell into the buggy seat and he sat down on them and ruined his new suit. We talked about the weather, and how things have changed in the country, and how big Houston is, and when I got up to leave Lamb gave me the directions to my next stop.

When I got to the gate he came out on the porch again to tell me about a fork in the road he’d neglected to mention, and said I was to keep left at the fork and go through the gate. There is warmth left in this world, all right. It’s a good thing to dwell on that now and then, to know there are people who meet a stranger, and invite him in, and visit with him, and care about him, and help him a little, and send him away knowing they’ll never see him again.