For Buddy and me it has been a time of pondering this place of reflection.
It seems that my memories are filled with stories of the past, a past where I gathered an education riding in box cars and the sound of train whistles blowing. The tobacco fields were hot, and the sun was brutal yet picking cotton was the worst thing I ever had to do.
I watched my daddy and he was working as hard as anyone in the fields, yet he would ask me if I was ready to quit for the day. I would always tell him that my last name was Tyler and I never quit. I would stay in the cotton until Daddy headed to the house.
I cherish these memories, and I am grateful for my new memories, yet they don’t seem to come close to the ones I had growing up. They were epic like a book that you never wanted to put down.
Buddy and I cherish every day that we get in the truck and ride down a dirt road taking the long way home. We share a sadness when we see an old barn falling down, or homes abandoned left to slowly becoming forgotten places.
I feel that it is up to me and Buddy to catch these images as reminders from a time when life was simple, and families were important and loving to each other. It touches me deeply that so many churches are falling down and the people left them.
I still bow my head and say a prayer when I sit in the empty church pew.
The churches are falling down, I believe, because people look around at the world and a lot of what they see causes them to lose faith in other people, in the world itself and even in their God. I left the Catholic church in my teens when I realized that God was everywhere we look and everywhere we are. I’m pretty sure you feel the same way. There’s a spirituality to the stuff you write that runs deeper than mere nostalgia. I don’t think you can get there the way you do without the sense that God is everything.