Recently, I passed an area which long ago must have been the site of an old country house. The brush and trees there were not as tall as the surrounding area, but the old brick chimney still standing tall identified the place as someone’s sometime home. The rest of the structure had burned down or perhaps merely fallen down with age. But the old bricks had been put in place by a careful artist and so still stood warming the heart if not the hearth. I wondered why nostalgia tugged at my mind as I saw the old fireplace.
It was because once this old place was a home. At night travelers down the road could see the light coming from the windows and know that there were people therein who loved each other. There was shelter for children; there were warm beds. There were rushed mornings when children left hurriedly to catch the school bus. There were late night vigils when the mother and father wondered how they would survive another year on the old place. There was the night when sleep came very late. Someone’s standards had failed and everyone was ashamed. And then there came another long night, very tragic, when someone died.
I found myself a little angry that time so soon could scatter the timbers of so many dear and wonderful creations of God.
But I looked at the courage and hope of the still standing chimney. It reminded me of the gristle that is in many of us when all the fat tissue has been used to sustain life and the organism called man is barely surviving from day to day. Something in us still stands from day to day, and we learn to get up each new morning and go again.
Those of us who are children of God know that this is faith. And we know that a lot of the parts of our earthly tabernacle are decaying, but our inward man is being renewed day by day with the strength of eagles. And long after the woods have completely taken the place where the house once stood and the trees stand tall above it, the chimney will still be there reminding those who accidentally discover it in a woodland trek that there was once a noble species who lived in this place a little lower than the angels.