Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the distant past and the distant future and my temporary little place in the present in between. In the last three years I've spent more time, energy and money into improving our little spot of land on Chicken Creek than I have the previous 47 combined. I've been taking my place in a line that goes back to the early 1960's when my Grandaddy Richard bought this little spot of land and began making changes and leaving his mark on the landscape. Twenty-five years ago my daddy did the same, though cancer, a heart attack, three aneurysms and COPD has taken away his ability to contribute anything more than money. Now it is my turn. My grandaddy had around forty years here, my daddy has had over 25 at present, and I'm sitting on three, with who knows how much ahead of me. I have two sons and a grandson, as well as two granddaughters after me, all of whom will have to make up their own minds about whether they want to get in line too, but for now, it's me and Honey, most every morning around 5:45, and then again in the evenings when I get off work till close to dark. For the first time in my life I'm starting to understand why people are drawn to legacy. Take a walk with me...
Recently Honey and I were talking and we realized that we are the age now -- give or take a few years -- that our grandparents were when she and I first started dating. Sobering. At that time we both had great grandparents still living, and then our grandparents, then our parents, then us. We were the youngest generation and our grandparents were the next to oldest generation, and now, that is us. We are literally a few heartbeats away from being the oldest generation for our family. Sobering indeed. This reality, blended with a sermon I recently wrote based on the hymn "What Will I Leave Behind", has really brought the legacy thoughts front and center.
Since moving back to the farm -- right next to our own children and grandchildren -- almost two and a half years ago, little by little, we've cultivated our space the way Adam and Eve were put in the garden to tend it and keep it -- at least that's how I like to think of our work. In Genesis 2 God seemed to be handing the young couple a blank canvas and told them to get busy creating and using His work as a model for theirs. As you can see from the pictures above, when we settled back on the farm we had a sort of blank canvas of our own to work with. In the past, the space we were inheriting had been used as a cattle barn, a hay barn, and a "party barn" (that's what my parents called it because they would host family reunions and church get togethers there -- Honey and I even had our 25th anniversary party there). The driveway came off Chicken Creek road up to my daddy's house and stopped there. Not so many years ago, the field alongside the driveway was a pasture that was closed in by a fence with cedar posts made from trees harvested on this farm. Where my daddy's sheds now sit was a hog barn when I was a child. Fast forward to today, the cedar post pasture is now yard, and the driveway now extends down to that barn on one side and my son's house on the other. Cars are now parked where cows once grazed.
Our first contribution toward cultivating the space was the garden. If you were to ask Honey -- like Mary, quite contrary -- how her garden grows, I would interrupt and say "Usually by double each year." The garden has become quite the undertaking, but it is a labor of love and when it is in full bloom in the summer it is truly a magical place. Now that the garden is well established, our attention has turned to that old barn. In less than three years it has been transformed from an empty space, to the home of two pull behind campers -- one of which was actually a temporary residence -- to an open air tool shed and farm equipment storage space, to a dining room, to a kitchen, to a living room, to all of the above; not to mention, it often serves as a chapel/church. Honey and I share a living space that is smaller than most hotel rooms by half, so our outdoor space has become very important to us, hence the work renovating a hay barn into a homestead.
When I look at the pictures above, I don't see a thousand words, but a thousand memories. All of those pictures were taken between 8 and 10 years ago and they exist within a timeline of our greatest suffering. It was in this window of time that our normal and predictable world was interrupted and torn apart at the seams by disease, accidents, addiction, and death. I see these pictures and I see so much pain and exhaustion, more than just physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion too. I see a young husband and wife becoming an old married couple, complete with scars and wounds, but also becoming stronger than they ever knew they could be. It was the beginning of learning that you only grow stronger by embracing your weakness and leaning upon His strength. I used to tell this illustration in my sermons where a little boy is struggling in the yard to move a very large stone, much too big for his size and strength, but the boy was determined he was going to move this stone. His father sat on the front porch drinking coffee and watching all of this transpire. Eventually, the boy collapsed in exhaustion and frustration and disappointment and declared to no one in particular, "I can't move it! I've tried everything and I just can't move it!" To which the father spoke up and said, "You haven't tried everything. You haven't asked me for help" and "together" they picked up the rock and moved it. It was during the time of these photos that I stopped preaching that illustration and started listening to it and living it. Some days it was asking for the strength to move an obstacle, others it was asking for strength to get out of bed and get through the day.
When I look at these pictures I remember the conversations that accompanied them. The days when we sat in the swing in the barn, looking over this pasture and dreaming of what could be. We were dreaming, wanting, wishing, hoping, longing, needing, seeking, drifting, praying. We needed roots. We needed simple. We needed to start over and put to use the wisdom we had collected along the journey. Deep within us we knew that it was time for our orbit to return to its starting position. A decade earlier we had set off for adventure and we found it and we loved it, but a new season was approaching, the winds were shifting and the weather was changing and we needed a shelter from the storm. The day I took the picture of my beautiful little hippie chick with her crown of clover, we had been talking about "walking away from it all" and starting over. Could we? Would we? Should we? How would we do it? What would it look like? So many conversations, detailed plans, false starts and setbacks, but then one day, we finally set things in motion by putting a prayer in the wind like a seed from a dandelion.
It was a simple conversation really, and rather quite brief. After all of the hullabaloo over the years, one Sunday afternoon I told Honey I was putting in some online applications for jobs back home. She wasn't shocked, she wasn't outraged or terrified, she didn't want to talk it over and think about it, she just kind of said, "Really? Ok." One month later we were literally selling almost all of our possessions and moving to the spot we once sat and dreamed about. Our dreams were starting to become our reality, but our reality would become so much more than we had dreamed. In those endless conversations we never factored in grandchildren buzzing about this little plot of land like bees, bringing a sweetness to our lives like honey on our lips. This is where the thoughts of legacy really begin to take root. In the faces of your grandchildren you glimpse a future you will not live to see, but you can help to create. It is for them that we are living by a quote that is attributed to a Greek proverb, "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit." In the moments of chaos and crying that often accompany a trio of toddlers, I can hear the faint chorus echo, "Leave behind, yes leave behind. What will I leave behind? After I leave for worlds unknown what will I leave behind?"
At the end of a day of hard work I like to sit in our rapidly evolving space and just take in the scenery. I like to look at all the work we've done, look out over the pasture and hills and woods and that's usually when the sobering thoughts settle on my heart like darkness at dusk. I sit and I look at "our family farm" and I wonder who was looking at this same view 100 years ago, 250 years ago, 500 years ago. When did the first person come to this land that is now this farm, setting in motion a line of owners and residents that leads to the five generations of Brittons who currently call this place home. Were there natives who found this fertile land near abundant water sources a safe and prosperous place to make their home? Was the field I stare at every day once filled with native families camped in a small community, building a life together? Or perhaps some European settlers found their way down here as the immigrants -- who crossed an ocean from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Germany -- began expanding farther away from the northeast and into the heart of the newly developing nation. Were there once woods where our pasture now lies? Did some man and his brothers or sons clear this land by hand to create space for livestock to graze? How long did they live here? When did they leave and where did they go, and why did they go? Are any of them actually buried beneath this farmland, lying in rest completely unknown to any living person? Maybe one day I'll get to meet them and hear their stories first hand. Maybe we will all walk these fields together in the light of an endless day.
It's possible no one inhabited this farm until more recent history, the late 1800's or early 1900's. Maybe this pasture land was just a forrest and no one lived here beyond the wildlife. What did it look like before the road was built -- and when was it built anyway -- and the driveways were carved out?
I think about that past, but I also think about the distant future. What will this look like in 100 years, or 250 years? No one that I now know, and no one that ever knew I existed will likely be around. While it is possible this farm will still be home to Brittons, it is also unlikely. A lot of things change in 100 years. 100 years ago, virtually no one in this area had indoor plumbing, electricity, or an automobile. Fast forward to today and essentially everyone carries a device in their pocket that would have been considered magic (or witchcraft) by those people 100 years ago, and now we can take out our device and turn on the lights, have bottled water delivered to our doorstep and start our cars. As I write these words there is a news story in the background about the Artemis II astronauts trip around the moon, but 100 years ago flying in an airplane was in its infancy, having only existed for little over a decade. The United States Air Force was still twenty years away from existence 100 years ago. With the rise and acceleration of AI, what will 100 years from now even look like? In my 50 years I've witnessed the ever expanding encroachment of Nashville from the north and Huntsville from the south. Tiny towns just north of us that were farmland when I was in high school -- Spring Hill -- have become large cities with homes and businesses stacked on top of one another. Is this little plot of paradise that I now call home going to be a subdivision or a strip mall in 100 years? Or maybe it will all be underwater, or oceanfront property. Obviously, there is no way to know the answers to these questions, past or future, but this is where my mind wanders lately.
I don't have to know the answers to questions past and future, to have enough information to work with in my present, so we build, and transform, and create, and cultivate as time, money, energy, and weather allow. We plant and we grown and we don’t sell what we produce; we give it away and that's by design. Consider it our personal act of defiance against a world obsessed with wealth and profit and expanding market share. Sadly, that has become true of the Christian faith as well. Richard Halverson -- who served as the Senate Chaplain for fourteen years -- once observed, "When the Greeks got the gospel they turned it into a philosophy, when the Romans got it they turned it into a government, when the Europeans got it they turned it into a culture; when the Americans got it they turned it into an enterprise." Eric Hoffer -- recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- would add, "What starts out (in America) as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation." The Great Awakening was hijacked and turned into a great merchandizing; from revival to retail, from Beatitudes to business models. Consider this our opening salvo in a war against endless acquisitions and accumulations. It is an act of defiance and revolution against the encroachment of the wilderness of worldliness into the Garden of God's goodness. I don't know what the distant future will hold, but for this little sliver of time that we inhabit, this place is a fort in hostile territory, a planted flag declaring our stand against the enemy that is scarcity, fear, exploitation, distraction and division.
Do I think I’m going to change the world? No, but I know He is, and He does through a million little micro transactions of truth, goodness and beauty everyday. One of the few non-essential possessions we allow into our home is a piece of art on the wall bearing a quote from Mother Theresa, "If you want to save the world, go home and love your family." That picture sits just above our kitchen sink, making it the first thing I see when I open my eyes every morning. Hopefully, in the near future, another piece of art will adorn the outdoor kitchen sink, a picture of Jesus in a floral apron washing dishes with the Dorothy Day quote, "Everybody wants a revolution. Nobody wants to do the dishes." This is our little effort, and though our capabilities are small, in His hands they move mountains, multiply for thousand, still storms, part seas, and defeat death. And it's not just the landscape we are transforming, I'm working on myself, more than ever before. Maybe it's because I've spent 30 years removing the biggest obstacles that took up the most space in my life, that I can actually get down to rooting out the source of the problems and replace them with seeds of something better and fruitful.
I want to close with a quote that I first encountered at 13, as filtered through a fictional character in a Jimmy Buffett short story from the book Tales From Margaritaville. That book and those characters influenced me more in my formational years than anyone or anything else, and obviously they still do. The original quote, I believe, was from Forest Witcraft, who wrote, "A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove... but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child." I encountered a variation of the quote from the character Tully Mars, or was it Donna Kay, or perhaps it was Frank Bama...regardless...a hundred years from now none of this will matter, but right now it does.
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