Paint Creek

"Paint Creek & the Mystery of Christ"
by Curtis Shelburne

“. . . you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God's holy apostles and prophets.”

Ephesians 3:4-5

"My younger brother Jim and I walked among the headstones dotting the small country cemetery nestled near the Edith Community a little over eight miles outside of Robert Lee, Texas.

Well-kept but absolutely blending in with their surroundings, the headstones at Paint Creek Cemetery had grown up where once only mesquite trees and prickly pears had dotted the landscape. Not far off, but far enough away to be absolutely unobtrusive, was a defunct country cafe and a flock of goats.

A few jackrabbits darted in and out between the stones, oblivious to the mute but powerful witness borne by granite markers to untold stories and the fabric of life and love, tragedy and triumph, joy and sadness laid out before us in the patchwork quilt of humanity’s struggle.

Just a little way over from where we were standing was a short white stone, a little granite lamb resting on its top, bearing the names of three boys, triplets we supposed—Terry, Kerry, and Gerry—and only one date.

Not far away was a larger stone bearing two names— Arizona Cain Robertson and Maurice Robertson. Mother and child. The date of her death was the date of the birth, and the death, of her child. It pointed to another death. A death of dreams. Her dreams, of course.

But also the dreams of a husband and father as on that May day in 1928 the sun of his deepest joy was unexpectedly eclipsed by the darkness of an even deeper sadness.

Many of the stones bore witness to conflict. One stone honored a 1st Sergeant who fought with Company E of the 2nd Texas Regiment, Confederate States Army. Another was a memorial to a “PRIVATE, WORLD WAR I, 31ST DIVISION, COMPANY 165, DEPOT BRIGADE.”

I wondered about the perky-looking 32-year-old whose photograph watched me from her headstone.

More than a few of the names in that country cemetery I recognized. Names of Robert Lee families.

The first time I ever saw that name chiseled on a headstone, it caught me by surprise. Still makes me feel funny.

Alf Key, my great-grandfather, donated land for that cemetery. His bones lie there. Not much more than a stone’s throw from the windmill and remaining ruins of his old homestead.

The pattern on the quilt is emerging. Death hasn’t skipped a single generation. And it won’t skip mine.

Alf Key had no idea what he was setting in motion back in 1888 when he and his wife Cornelia homesteaded in what would become Coke County, Texas.

Alf Key was born in 1865, the year the American Civil War ended. On Sunday, April 9, 1865, Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met at Appomattox, Virginia, and Lee surrendered. On Friday, April 14, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre. And earlier that week, on Monday, April 10, Alf Key was born.

It’s ironic, you know. He and I have spent many a night in the same old house in Robert Lee. But we never spent a single moment together.

His thoughts and attitudes and actions, the choices he made in his life, affect me every day of my life in ways that I cannot begin to imagine. But I wonder.

I wonder. And I’ll bet he wondered, too, though he never knew my name. I’ll bet he wondered about what he was setting in motion.

Did he ever pick up a stone from the red Coke County ground, toss it into a pool of water in Paint Creek, watch the ripples, and wonder about the people, the names, the faces, the lives that would be the ripples set in motion by his life?

Alf Key knew from whence he’d come. He knew the kind of values he was trying to instill in his children. He lived a long 90 years, long enough to see the fruit that was coming from roots he’d worked to nurture.

He’d done what he needed to do to help set the plot in motion. Now his kids and grandkids were writing or beginning to write their own chapters in the story. He could only guess what chapters they might write with their lives.

Alf Key’s chapter was ending on one side of the page and mine was beginning on the other. That this old gentleman I never knew could affect me so profoundly is a mystery to me. And I wonder about the lives I’m affecting, shaping, coloring right now.

Only the true Author knows about the lives on the other side of the page. Only he knows what will be written there.

My great-grandfather didn’t look much like an Old Testament patriarch or prophet. (He had a magnificent moustache but sported no beard to go with it.) But, in a small way, he shared their dilemma. He knew he was part of a story, but how the pages would turn and the plot would unfold, he didn’t know.

Nowhere in the Old Testament will you find a man more committed to God, more used by him, more a part of the divine plan that would culminate in the cross and the resurrection than the one-time slave baby, one-time prince, one-time shepherd named Moses.

We read the wonderful story of Moses’ life quickly. But don’t you know that as Moses lived it, he often wondered about the story being written?

A Shepherd’s Story

All taken together, it was not that bad a life, the shepherd mused, guiding his sheep toward the well. The work could be hard, but he was not afraid to bend his back. It was honest work, was it not?

Leave courage to lions, cunning to tigers, antics to monkeys, and wisdom to owls. Sheep make no great claim to any of those attributes. They were just like any “run of the mill” animal, his shepherd friends might have mused, only more so!

More likely to get themselves into the sort of fix it took a wary shepherd to rectify, but more likely to get under your skin with that simple trust they placed in a loving shepherd.

More likely to need extra attention right at the times you were busiest, but, he figured, maybe more likely to deserve it.

No, he didn’t mind taking care of sheep. After all, it had been misguidedly taking care of people, not sheep, that had nearly done him in so many years ago.

When he had come here to Midian—it was more accurate to say, when he had run here to Midian—he was running for his life. He’d looked for all the world like the Egyptian prince that he was, the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter.

No one would take him for a prince of Egypt now. He was a shepherd, and he looked the part. He’d traded a scepter for a shepherd’s staff. His only subjects were the sheep under his care. Let other men rule kingdoms. Keeping his sheep out of harm’s way was challenge enough for him.

Well, he’d been lost in thought long enough, sitting on a hillock of grass watching his sheep graze. As he stood, it occurred to him that he was content with his life in Midian, that he liked his shepherd’s work and, not least, he liked the time he spent out on the hills far away from others—quiet time, time to think, to ponder, to wonder.

He could live and die a shepherd and that would be fine with him. But he wondered why the God of his fathers had chosen for him such a circuitous route to Midian?

Why have him born in a foreign land, a land of slavery in which his first breath might well have been his last?

Why have him floated down river in a basket and plucked from the arms of the Nile to become an Egyptian prince?

Why let him be chased out of Egypt when his own sense of who he was as a Hebrew flared into deadly force?

Surely, Lord, there is a quicker way to put a man in Midian to serve as a shepherd!

No, he didn’t understand the Providence that had guided his life. But he knew that now he was a shepherd, and that was enough. And he knew that the sheep straying over toward the south side of the hill needed his care more than he needed to ponder.

God’s people have always wondered. Even the men and women of greatest faith have wondered.

In their lives. In the lives of their people. In the story being written in this world.

From the time of the fall to sin in the Garden, the Author of Life began hinting at, pointing toward, foreshadowing, the wonderful climax of his story.

I suppose the first hint is given way back in Genesis 3 where God hints to a snakebitten world that the time would come when the serpent’s head would be crushed by the Seed of woman.

Many years later God’s word is given to Abraham that through the old patriarch and his children all the nations of the earth would one day be blessed.

God was telling him about a marvelous story that would be—was already being—written, and Abraham and his kids were being cast in leading roles.

When the promise was given, old—very old—Abraham didn’t even have one child.

How are you going to write a story and feature a family if the family in question is just a childless husband and wife?

How are you going to write a story of epic proportions if the main character’s likely to die childless somewhere in the next paragraph? (No insurance underwriter in his right mind would write a policy on a man that old!)

By the time of the prophets, God scatters even more hints that the time would not be long. The Messiah, the one who would save God’s people, was coming!

To a people oppressed by their enemies, a people who had been held captive by one foreign king after another, a people who desperately needed a reason to hope, a nation the pages of whose history had been blotched with blood and tears, the Author pointed to the time when he would break into the story in a marvelous way.

And well they might. I would have wondered, too. And I never could have guessed the story the Author of Heaven would write.

And the greatest Christmas Present ever given is all wrapped up in swaddling cloths and laid in a feed trough.

And the mother of the King is a poor Jewish girl whose wedding, the thin-lipped gossips around Bethlehem would be quick to tell you, was much less than a discreet nine months before the birth. Mark it down, those gals could count to nine just as quickly as their modern counterparts.

And the birth announcement for God’s Son? It was proclaimed by angels whose glory split the skies, but (“who’d-a-thunk-it?”) the amazing proclamation was not made at a grand meeting of pompously assembled and well-robed religious moguls of the Judean Diocese or the Southern Palestinian Convention or the Greater Bethlehem Ministerial Association.

No, it was proclaimed to terrified shepherds whose collars, if they’d had such, would have been decidedly blue, whose theology, if you could call it that, had more to do with the ancient equivalent of Starr Cut Plug tobacco than it did with heavenly lights. These were simple and rough-hewn men who’d spent lots of time on hills herding sheep and precious little time at all in synagogues.

They’d seen angels? Yeah, right. The folks back in town knew full well that the last time old Issachar had seen an angel he’d found him at the bottom of a wineskin.

Oh, some of them had been a bit sleepy just a moment before, but that had changed in a heartbeat, in the blink of an eye, as the night sky exploded with light and angels ripped apart the firmament to emblazon Heaven’s message across the shimmering sky.

God’s promise of salvation and the coming of the great King had been made long centuries before. Generations of kings had come and gone. And generations of shepherds had kept watch over their sheep on these same hills while Bethlehem slept below and, slumbering uneasily with the little city, a careworn world waited for God to rouse it with good news.

But then the message of Heaven came. The message of your salvation and mine. And it came to shepherds.

God Writes a Mystery

You see, the story that God has been writing down through the centuries is a mystery. Always has been. His people who know him, who love him, and who are loved by him, have always wondered what he would write next.

But the twists in the plot have always been far more wonderful than we could ever have written ourselves or even imagined.

Paul writes to the Ephesians about the “mystery of Christ,” the mystery that many had longed to unravel, the mystery “now . . . revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles” (3:5).

It’s the mystery that through the Good News of God, Gentiles and Jews would stand together as heirs of the promise in Christ.

It’s the mystery unfolding in the church as all of Heaven watches amazed at the way God is accomplishing his purpose in the universe.

The Father’s words boomed like thunder in Heaven’s throne room and rolled down steps of ethereal alabaster through the Great Hall of Glory and out into Eternity.

The heavenly host heard not the words, but the mighty music of the voice of God flooded through Heaven’s streets, every magnificent reverberation joining the great rolling stream, each wondrous wave capped with divine overtones of the Father’s love. And on earth, thunder.

“My Son, everything I have is yours. Nothing have I withheld. You are clothed in heavenly splendor. To you has been granted glory which knows no bounds.

“From before the foundations of the earth, before Eternity at my command whispered, ‘Time!’ and my Spirit brooded over an incubating creation, I have loved you.

“Now, in the Eternal Present where every moment is now, I ask, will you willingly enter time? Will you allow your divinity to be wrapped in the garment of humanity? Will you lay aside heavenly glory to redeem the fallen sons of Adam and daughters of Eve?”

In Heaven, where every moment is now, the Son’s voice now. “Abba, Father, Thy will be done.”

All of these chords intermingle with the angel’s eternal message, “He is not here! He is risen!”

And angels, numbering ten thousands times ten thousands, sang with tongues of light:

You may wonder what God, the great Author, is writing in the story of your life.

Alf Key wondered. And Moses long before him. And shepherds standing out on Judean hills two thousand years ago. And two minutes ago.

Don’t worry. You’re loved by the Author. He’s got a great ending in mind which is really not an ending at all. It’s by far the most beautiful of all beautiful beginnings, and it will never end.

You see, love is the last word—and the first word—in the story because the Author “is love.”