Well, this past week I was looking down into the holler toward Webb’s Creek and started thinking about my little country church. We only have about 50 or so members and we don’t have a paid piano player or TV screens above Pastor Alta. We can still see everything just fine. It is not fancy. There is a beautiful wooden cross mounted up high on the wall that was hand-made by one of our members and the parking lot was upgraded with gravel. In the summertime when we leave the front doors open you can hear the creek rushing on down to find the Little Pigeon River. That sound is always perfectly in tune with the hymns. Sometimes we have a crowd of ladybugs attending the service and last year a mother raccoon chose to have her babies in our church. We cooperated with her on that.
There is an old pump organ just a few feet to the left of the old oak lectern and Miss Jane has pumped out thousands of hymns on that antique over the past three decades. Our church bulletin always lists, “Special Music”, and that’s the time anyone can come up and sing a song or play the piano or organ. It may not always sound like the radio, but it is always special music. We have an interesting collection of characters almost exactly like those in that classic TV show, Little House on the Prairie. Maybe the most important description of my little church is that everyone truly cares for each other.
There are a lot of interruptions and challenges in normal day to day living, but just knowing that on Sunday mornings I can come down off this mountain and go sit in that back pew on the left in that little church on the creek keeps me in harmony with just about everything and everyone. I wish everyone in the world had a little wooden country church on a creek. Now that I think about it, though, it doesn’t have to be little, wooden or on a creek—doesn’t really even have to be a church. That is just how it looks from my log cabin.
John LaFevre is a local speaker and co-author of the acclaimed interactive national park hiking book series, Scavenger Hike Adventures, Falcon Guides, Globe Pequot Press. Contact John at scavengerhike@aol.com or at his blog at Falcon.com. Artist G Webb lives in Pittman Center, Tennessee. Gwebbgallery.com.
