Was, Is, Will Be

There’s no guess work in the clockworkOf the world’s heart or mineThere are nights I only feel rightWith Carolina in the pines.

Michael Martin Murphey

I hail from the South Carolina Sandhills, land of sand gnats, noseums, chiggers, sourweed, longleaf pines, and loblollies. The Sandhills yield to the Edisto River, the longest black river in the world. Along its bank lives a healthy riparian habitat. The people there are seasoned against its hot and humid climate giving rise to screened porches and ceiling fans and iced tea. Not all is idyllic along the Sandhills, but most folks know how to weather this ancient coastline.

I grew up in a majority African-American town. People living there develop a sort of rhythm in the living, kind of like the Edisto keeping time beneath the Spanish moss waving with the breeze. You can tell this by the local brogue, a beautiful Gullah remnant. Most learn not to get in a hurry in the heat because there’s just no use in it. Hurrying means getting all hot and bothered.

Well, getting hot and bothered is what happened for a few years. The pains of race relations in the late 1960’s proved equally difficult in my hometown. Sometimes hot and bothered is necessary if you want to get somewhere or make a point.

Bringing the past forward, I wrote something and this something talked about race. I decided to let my friend, Ed, an African-American living in my hometown, read it. I called him on the phone to tell him I was sending it to him through snail mail. I mentioned to him about the race part. His response was especially moving.

He said, “You know, it don’t matter. We all went through it.”

Life has meaning when wisdom speaks. “Through” is such a biblical, scriptural word. God brings us through so many times, personal and otherwise. He never leaves us in a place, never leaves us alone. This is a thing about God we ought to remember when the tough times come. Better to focus on through than get all hot and bothered and in a hurry. “Yea, though I walk through the valley,” says the 23^rd Psalm, through darkness it says. God always was, is, and will always be that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

Oddly, this makes me think about that sourweed growing in the Sandhills. I read not too long ago the only way to get rid of sourweed is to make the field fertile. Now when it comes to race relations, there remains a plethora of opinions on what type of fertilizer to use. But when it comes to getting through the valley, through the tough times, no one can make a field more fertile than the Almighty.

There’s another thing, too. Those longleaf pines populating my hometown provide a lot of shade from the heat, making life more tolerable. The picture is sitting in that shade with a good glass of sweet tea. God knows how to provide shade. We just need to go there like clockwork.