The Place

W. Carl Ketcherside

[Page 8]

     There were just the three of us and we were sitting in the den, quietly talking about our faith. He had been here once before when he came to apologize for having formed an opinion about me based upon what others had said. Now he had a few more days respite from college and he had brought his fiancee, for he wanted me to know her also. We all seemed to be relaxed with each other and there was no reserve created by the need to be formally polite. We were members of the same family and there were no barriers.

     He said, "You seem to exhibit such positiveness. Don't you ever have any doubts? I mean the kind that gnaw at you deep down and in the dark."

     I thought for awhile before I replied for I did not want to project a false image. I confessed that there were a lot of areas in which I was not sure, and I thought this was good because it made me cautious where I might be impetuous. But there was no doubt in my heart about the existence of God, or his providential concern for my life, or my hope of seeing him face to face after the mists have risen from the final valley.

     I pointed out that such doubts belong to those who are younger, those who have time. They flit through the mind like a sparrow fluttering through the living-room, and you not only must drive them out but also repair the aperture through which they entered. Some of us do not have time left to chase sparrows or to fix windows, so we must be careful to keep our mind on the task at which we are working.

     The girl spoke up. "Even if one doesn't have any real doubt, don't you think there may be some special place where it is easier to believe, where you can just close your eyes and lean back and somehow know that God is there?"

     Then I told them of Abraham and the place of the smoking lamp; of Jacob at Bethel, which to him was "the gate of heaven"; of Moses and the burning bush; of Samuel and the stone pillar, called Ebenezer; and of Elijah and the cave mouth on Sinai. Everyone has a place, I think, and it is the place to him only of all the teeming millions of the earth. No one else would ever understand its magnetic pull on his heart.

     I am a native of the hill country. One who was born where the blue haze of the Ozarks dips gently down to kiss the brow of distant cedar-clad mountains, may find his faith meaningful when he lifts up his eyes to these hills. As a barefoot youngster I imbibed faith when I drank from clear springs, when I smelled the fragrant wood smoke from a cabin chimney, when I heard the echo of honking wild geese in a flying wedge against

[Page 9]

the setting autumnal sun. Every sense said there was a beneficent Creator.

     So there is a moss-covered ledge extending out above a gently winding river, which I can still see in my dreams, although I have not been there for years. It is completely hidden from sight of any human habitation. As a young preacher still going to high school I used to go there often. It helped to clear the cobwebs from my brain and air out the musty corners of soul.

     Sometimes it was spring and the dogwood tree, of which legend says the cross was made, was in full bloom. The redbud also gave startling beauty to every slope, while on the ground there were patches of delicate wild violets which looked as if someone had carelessly thrown down a purple carpet.

     Again it was summer, and the rasping sound of the cicada was heard, demanding attention above the melody created by the birds, nature's sylvan choral society. If it was late evening there might be the booming bass of a bullfrog hidden in the weeds along the bank of the stream, or the sudden splash of a leaping fish. And always there was the faraway bawling of the cows as they plodded homeward from pasture to milking-shed.

     Or, perhaps it was autumn, and the golden persimmons were ripening from the first frost, or the wild grapes were hanging in tangy clusters upon the vines. If one sat without moving, sweeping only his eyes across the panorama, life was everywhere manifest. On the opposite hillside a fox might be seen slipping through the hackberry bushes and sumac. Closer at hand, a squirrel, wholly oblivious to your presence, would be gathering hickory-nuts or acorns to add to the hoard in his secret cache.

     And then there was winter. I've visited the place when the sleet pelted my face like leaden shot, and when it rattled against the stiff canvas of my hunting coat as it did against the window panes. I liked this world of white with its ghostly shadows above, a world which belonged for a few fleeting minutes just to myself and the great wraith-like owl whose enormous wings made hardly a rustle while slipping through the gloom on a bloody mission of survival.

     And I never turned back toward the world with its arteries of rushing traffic, of whining rubber and throbbing steel; with its narrow streets and alleys filled with misery and squalor and sin, that I did not stop and repeat aloud for my ears and for His, "And the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth...While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."

     Yes, there are places where you can just close your eyes, and lean back and know that He is there. And when you have known such a place you can go anywhere else on earth without doubting. For once you have come to know the Presence in your life, nothing else that ever happens can stifle or erase it.