We are visiting Pinson, Alabama, this week—the place I loosely call home.
I say “loosely” because I’m not 100% sure where home is, and I haven’t been for some time. My soul has been stretched across the globe. Now “home” is not so much a geographical location as it is wherever my beautiful wife and son are.
Semantics aside, this small town outside of Birmingham is where my parents raised me. It is a place where I am never far from the bones of my paternal ancestors.
This is a place where childhood nostalgia lingers in the air.
I spent my first two decades of life here, not realizing just how much bigger the world was and how little I understood it.
I drive by my childhood home and remember turning over rocks in the back yard in search of creepy crawlers. The less fortunate ones would end up captured and put in a jar for an indeterminate amount of time. We had a large outdoor light that illuminated the back yard after the sun went down. I would sit up at night and stare out the window when I was supposed to be sleeping. I remember one night spent imagining that I could interpret the noisy exchange of neighborhood dogs into human language. My sweet mom had the unenviable task of trying to get me out of bed every morning after these nighttime vigils.
Speaking of yards: driving around these familiar streets reminds me of my first job as a teenager—cutting grass. I mowed the lawns of my grandmother, great aunt, and two unmarried sisters that lived down the street (all of them have long since passed away). Our 1974 brown Ford pickup (which I affectionately called the “Dr Pepper can”) was the way I usually moved our equipment from house to house once I was old enough to drive. I worked and worshiped in these yards under the hot Alabama sun, always armed with my yellow, waterproof Walkman. I listened to countless hours of Charles Stanley sermons or my favorite music while marching behind the lawn mower. I’m sure there was also some daydreaming mixed in with my perspiration. That lawn mower, by the way, was bought at Sanders hardware, owned by my dad’s cousin.
Thoughts of these long-gone years bring a smile to my face. But they are mixed with memories of teenage angst that leave me with no desire to turn the clock back. I was a hopeless romantic and an aspiring athlete, both of which were sources of bitter disappointment in my high school years. I always seemed to fall for the girl that was just out of reach. My physical skills (or lack thereof) were not a good match for football, my favorite sport.
I also cringe when I think about some of the sermons, devotionals, and Bible studies I wrote and presented during the latter part of this era. I’m thankful that only a few survive as cassette tapes buried in a drawer. I’m deeply grateful for the church that nurtured my faith and endured some of my first attempts at teaching and preaching. I knew God had called me, but my understanding of both the Scriptures and life was fairly superficial back then.
I graduated high school and attended a community college located just a few miles away (Jefferson State Community College, which we called “Harvard on the hill”). Not exactly an adventurous move, but a thrifty one that did result in a slight change of scenery (new faces, at least). There I connected with one of my most cherished mentors, Momma Jo Randall.
Jo introduced me to a like-minded group of students in an organization known as the Baptist Campus Ministries (BCM). This rag tag group of friends would prove to be some of the best people I’ve ever met. Quite a few of them have become pastors, and most of them are faithfully serving God in some form or fashion. A couple of them are my closest friends to this day.
There they are—a few random memories from my first two decades.
The life I have lived looks radically different than the one my naïve mind had envisioned back then.
But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
