Gatlinburg, Tennessee – We write and send greetings to you all this week from the high mountains of Tennessee’s Great Smokies. Each year – usually about this time in December – the amazin’ blonde and I fly to Atlanta and spend a few days up in these mountains as well as back in my hometown of LaGrange, Georgia. Our best friends Coca-Cola Mike and Glory hosted us for a few days there until we headed north to Tennessee after the Lord’s Day services.
Such a trip, obviously, is refreshing – both in the clean mountain air we are able to breath for a few days and in the great people we are able to lay our eyes on again. Perhaps it was more of my own inner excitement in being home than anything, but it seems that the spirit in my old hometown church where I was raised was better than I had seen it in a long time. Perhaps it could never surpass some of the old days when my grandparents Preacher Miller and Grandma, and my auburn-headed Uncle Alton and Aunt Florence graced that Southern landscape. As we know, few things can surpass those “days of yore.”
But our current church loved-ones are in high spirits as they now meet in their just-completed new church building off of the Roanoke Road that leads to the Alabama line fifteen miles further. The building is beautiful – Coca-Cola Mike oversaw much of its construction – and the spirit inside equaled the outer beauty.
I wish I could introduce you Oklahoma friends, one by one, to all of those old Georgia loved ones. Few of them are left that have the same blood flowing in their veins as I. But those who have gone on are still there in spirit, and their works “follow them,” as the great apostle John writes (Revelation 14:13).
What a great privilege it always is, too, to be able to address the congregation as we have done almost every time we have gone back home since we left in the autumn of 1973. We opened the Word of God to John’s writings twice on that day – to the first chapter of the gospel of John in the morning, and to the epistle of 1 John in the afternoon. Now, I am the worst gauge of my own sermons of anyone, so you never know the impact a presentation of scriptures may have on an audience. But I am not a poor gauge of the impact that standing and looking out over that hometown audience had and always has on me. It is one of life’s great blessings. I can truly say with John, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day” (Revelation 1:10).
With the Lord’s Day past and our having put that experience in the top file of our memory, we write now – as is our custom – on the Monday following, now looking out over the Smokies and God’s handiwork in the beauties of Tennessee. Both views – the one in that Four Oaks Church of Christ pulpit of LaGrange, Georgia, and the one high up in these mountains – inspire us to say, with John, that the Lord “carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain” (Rev. 21:10).
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