Hysterical Trip on a Historical Trail Leads to a Heavenly Truth
“Hysterical Trip on a Historical Trail Leads to a Heavenly Truth”
In June of 1997, I took my first trip with the senior adults of Springfield Baptist Church. At that time they innocently called themselves the LLL Club. During that first trip I discovered it meant Laughter, Leave, and Leftover – Laughter, because there was a lot of it; Leave, as in the phrase “taken leave of their senses”; and Leftover, as in the sentence “whenever we ate there was nothing leftover.” We got the bus loaded (the only way we could get the bus to agree to go was to get it loaded) and headed for Natchez, Mississippi along the Natchez Trace.
The Natchez Trace was named after Irving Natchez, an 18th century artist who bought out every piece of tracing paper at the early Walmart stores in the area and traced a line on the map from Nashville to Natchez. It was the main trade route connecting these two cities from 1785-1820. They had to build another road when the tracing paper finally dissolved into the ground. The Trace has several points of historical significance where you can stop and read interesting facts, study ancient burial grounds, and when no one is looking steal little historical plums off of the historical trees.
Entering Natchez was like stepping back in time. Of course just being with our senior adults was like stepping back in time. Natchez has the largest collection of antebellum homes in the South. Antebellum, of course, is a Latin word meaning “large cruiseship-size houses built by extremely rich and extremely white people before the Civil War.” Ante really means “before” so to be technically correct we must say that these houses were built before the bellum. We even had the age of the houses authenticated by several people in our group who were actually in Natchez in 1860.
As we took tours of the homes our guides described the elaborate furnishings, table settings, etc., with classy words like Queen Anne, King George, Louis XIV, and Victorian. It was very similar to the way tour guides will describe my house in 150 years. They will use classy terms like Early Garage Sale, Flea Market, Vinyl City, Tupperware, The College Years, and Doghair.
The most beautiful place we saw was a house called Longwood, a six-story home built in 1860. It had one small problem. Only the outside and the basement were finished. Floors two through six were only a shell, including the scaffolding used during construction. When the Civil War began the workers literally dropped what they were doing and went home, leaving the house with a misleadingly gorgeous exterior and an unfinished, ugly interior.
I have never seen a house like that before but we all have seen people whose spiritual house is in similar disarray. They look fine on the outside but the inside is only a shell. It is unfinished. They are spiritually hollow. They have never been introduced to the Master Builder who could show them how to do the inside work necessary for a complete and lasting house.
It could also be a Christian who has never allowed the Master Carpenter to do His finishing work in him. Philippians 1:6 says, “And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns” (NLT). Like Longwood, these “houses” will always be nice attractions, but until they are finished they will never fulfill the original intent of the Designer.