Dust and Water (Part I)

[This post has been delayed because of events I will mention over the next few days.]

This last weekend, the clan and I went back to Lone Oak Baptist Church. Lone Oak is a small community (population around 250) around an hour west of Waco, right on the edge of the beautiful Texas Hill Country.* It has been over three years since we had visited.

It was/is a small church. On high attendance Sunday we ran around 60. I served there as pastor for five years while I worked through the graduate program at Baylor University. It was my first (and so far, only) experience as pastor of a church. Kadie and I were richly blessed in our time there.

Water and dust and sum up my feelings about Lone Oak. Water and dust formed the raw materials of Adam and also formed the essential elements of life in Lone Oak. Water is the sustainer of life everywhere, but its presence and absence particularly marks life in a rural, agricultural environment. One of my predecessors made the mistake of lamenting a thunderstorm one Sunday morning. One of the farmers scolded him saying “Look here young man, one thing you don’t do in this church is complain about rain!” I learned quickly that as the water runs, so does farming life.

I can remember the ground incredibly parched while farmers wondered whether it would be best to send their cows to the slaughterhouse rather than to ship in hay to feed them. Dry weather also meant that the tanks (for some reason, that’s what they call ponds in Central Texas) would run low and even the horses and goats would suffer from lack of water.

And when the water came, it could be imposing. Thunderstorms beat down upon a landscape that was only “protected” by 10 foot high, gnarled mesquite trees. There is barely enough grass to cover the ground, so often thunderstorms would carve gullies through the dirt and sand and beat upon any edifice that humans have deigned to scratch together.

I recall visiting a new member of the community. He and his wife lived in a 12 by 20 foot shed while they built their home. We went by and exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes while a thunderstorm rolled in. Then the sky opened up and rain began to pelt the tin roof of the shed. We had to scream at each other to be heard. One of my enduring memories of Lone Oak was me yelling things at John like “So how long have you worked at the plant!” and him screaming back “Oh, about 23 years!!!!”

But water was not always pleasant or humorous. It could also break death as well as life. As William Brown has said, sometimes in ancient Israel, the only thing more dangerous than the absence of water was the presence of water. That was true in Lone Oak too.


*Lone Oak is not the real name, and is not on the map. At least, I don’t think it is. Let me hit mapquest and look. Ummm OK, apparently there are SIX Lone Oaks in Texas. Well, this isn’t any of them!