Driving home tonight, the sun was shining through the trees, leaving striped shadows across the road that danced with the light with an almost strobe-like effect. Instantly, I was carried back in time to when I was a boy riding in the back seat of my father's 1951 Ford, on our way on a Friday evening to my maternal grandparents, where we would have dinner and watch TV till the Friday night fights were over. Route 104, better known locally as Ridge Road, was a newly paved concrete thoroughfare that took us from Stone Road to their home just east of Clarkson. The concrete was poured in ten or twelve foot sections that made the tires sound a distinct "thump-thump, thump-thump" as we drove along. Nelson Hill Road, on which I was driving tonight, made that same sound. I don't know if there are concrete slabs beneath the blacktop, but that combination of sound and light took me back.
Memories can be one of God's most precious gifts, or the demonic bearer of a history of pain and suffering better left in the past. I am one of the fortunate ones. My childhood was pretty dull by some standards; I would call it serene. There was a steady regularity to our lives that became the experiential foundation for my faith. God could be trusted; life was orderly and reliable. Those stripes of light and dark this afternoon were like God tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me that in these tumultuous times, life still has order and dependability because God is its Author, and in the fifty-five years since we drove Ridge Road, he hasn't changed. For that, I am genuinely thankful.
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