the rock from medlock

       The Rock from Medlock…
 
From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.  (Psalm 61:2)
 
I’VE CLIMBED THIS MOUNTAIN at Stone Mountain, Georgia. It is “higher than I.”  The small quarried rock in the lower picture is from the chimney that stood at the end of the house in which I was born and lived for eight years, in Medlock Hollow at Alpine, Tennessee. The house was built before the Civil War Between the States.

THE DINING ROOM FEATURED THE FIREPLACE to the chimney and in its ceiling were several bullet holes from the Civil War. Soldiers were looking for some men and thought they might be in the attic. But, to avoid the risk of being shot if they stuck their heads up in the attic, they simply walked around in the room and shot up through the ceiling.

A LIMESTONE CHIMNEY WOULD REQUIRE CUT STONE from a rock quarry and would be quite expensive. Most rock chimneys were made from sandstone rocks taken from a river or creek bed. I never understood how our house rated a limestone chimney. Grandpa’s daddy owned the house. He and his wife died there. His daddy died from a rattlesnake bite in Oklahoma while visiting his daughter.

THEY WERE ABLE TO SAVE MY GREAT-GRANDPA and told him not to ever get hot. But, after returning home, in 1925, he was determined to help with a brush fire where they were clearing a field up on the side of the mountain. He got hot; his tongue swelled out of his mouth and choked him to death.
 
MY GRANDPA BUILT A NEW HOUSE 100 yards down the hill in 1896. He and Grandma birthed and raised a family of three, including my mother. Grandpa finished the third grade and was able to read and write. He and my mother got typhoid fever out of the well and almost died. I remember Medlock Hollow as a lively place in summers when kinfolk gathered in from Michigan and Nashville and my cousins came in and took over.

MEDLOCK WAS MY PLACE AND I HAD TO BE PATIENT until the intruders left. It had its rewards. We bought 10-cents worth of ice and kept it in a quilt in a tub in the cellar. That kept us in iced tea, which I dearly loved. When the ice was gone, someone would drive 12 miles to Livingston and buy another 10-cents worth of ice and we had homemade ice cream. We already had plenty of milk and deep-yellow eggs. Gasoline was 23-cents a gallon and bottle cokes were a nickel. We had to go somewhere to get a coke because the six-pack hadn’t been invented yet.
  
MY DADDY WAS A SAWMILL MAN and we lived in Medlock while Daddy was off somewhere running his sawmill. We went bankrupt in Medlock in 1939, during the depression. There was a false recovery in 1938, toward in the end of the ten-year Depression, and then a sharp drop. My daddy had a yard of lumber that wouldn’t sell when the housing market crashed. We did get two new outdoor toilets out of one stack of lumber. Some men came by from the WPA and built them for us, using our lumber. That was the September when Hitler invaded Poland and the stage was set for the beginning of World War II.

ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1941, it was unseasonably warm, but we knew a cold front was coming so we worked all Sunday afternoon getting in firewood. The news had come in on the battery radio after we got back from church at Falling Springs Baptist Church that Pearl Harbor was being bombed. I had never heard of Pearl Harbor, but it must be pretty bad the way the grownups were reacting to the news. A lot changed on that day. Grandma was being treated for something and it turned out to be cancer. She died before Christmas in 1941.

MEDLOCK HOLLOW. It should have been called: The Medlock University because that’s where I learned the foundational things of my life. I learned my letters off the lard bucket and baking powder can in the kitchen by kerosene lamp. Well, there were a few letters like Q and Z that weren’t in the kitchen. My mother kindled a fire about 4:00 a.m. and got breakfast going by 4:30.

THE SMELL OF COFFEE AND OATMEAL always woke me up and I slipped into the kitchen to watch Mama and work on my letters. We had a dozen men in the back yard, bedded down in a shack made of sawmill slabs. Mother cooked their breakfast and packet their lunch in 4-pound lard buckets. In mid-afternoon, she fired up the stove for supper. The men worked hard and ate hard.

OUR FRONT PORCH WAS THE LENGTH OF THE HOUSE and the men would sit out there and light up. They threw their cigarette butts off the porch. I watched them roll their cigarettes out of the little sacks of tobacco. I decided that if I gathered up the butts, I could get enough tobacco to make me a cigarette. I got the paper out of daddy’s shirt pocket after he went to sleep. Matches…that was the scary part. Striking a kitchen match was new to me.  But I soon had it mastered.

I DIDN'T KNOW WHY THEY WENT TO ALL THAT TROUBLE. It didn’t taste too good. And….my mother smelled it on my breath. Five. Before I started school.

IF IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR MY NEW FRIENDS AT SCHOOL, I would have dropped the whole thing. Smoking was the way you reached manhood. At school, some of the boys in the first and second grade brought their own tobacco and at recess, went to the boy’s outhouse and smoked down there. The teacher never checked on us or said anything. We were becoming men at the outhouse.

GRANDMA DIED BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 1941. Grandpa died in 1954. But things took a little twist. Daddy’s daddy had died in 1938 and his mother stayed with us now and then. When mother’s mother died in 1941, Daddy’s mother and Mother’s daddy….married. My mother and daddy became step-brother and sister. That made my mother to be also my aunt because she was my daddy’s sister, and Daddy became my uncle because he was my mother’s brother. My daddy became my uncle because he was the brother to my mother. And my brother and I became first cousins and I became my own first cousin because I was the son of my aunt and uncle…all of it “step” kin.

MY BROTHER (10 YEARS OLDER THAN ME) BOUGHT THE FARM but that didn’t last long. It changed hands several times. When my children were twelve, or so, and younger, I took them to Medlock and no one lived there. We walked up in the hollow, armed with a 22 rifle and we needed it to shoot a rattlesnake. The first shot went down the throat of the snake but didn’t kill it and I finally ended up smashing the snake’s head with a big flat rock. We took the 10 rattles and a button home with us.

THAT WAS ABOUT THE SAME SPOT where “me and Grandpa” were picking blackberries, years earlier. Grandpa carried an ax with him and a water bucket for the berries. Suddenly, he stopped picking and said quietly: “Look over there.” On the other side of the black berries was a five-foot rattlesnake, stretched out. He said, “Leave him alone and pick your berries.” When the two-gallon bucket was full of big, luscious berries, he set the berries several feet away under a tree, picked up the axe and cut a good-size sapling.

HE QUIETLY WALKED OVER TO THE SNAKE and with a few licks had put the snake out of business before it could coil up to fight. I learned something that day. If he had killed the snake first, he might have knocked half the berries off onto the ground beyond our reach. By picking the berries first, we got the berries AND the rattlesnake. I remembered that many times later in dealing with problems. My grandpa was a smart professor. I often said to myself: “What would Grandpa do?”

A FEW YEARS LATER WE WENT BACK FOR ANOTHER VISIT. Grandpa’s house had burned and the new owners had moved a mobile home there. The old house I had been born in, had rotted down and a concrete slab had been poured to build another house. The track of a snake had been made in the wet concrete as it had crawled across the slab.

NO ONE WAS HOME IN THE MOBILE HOME. Up on the hill where the new slab had been poured, half the limestone chimney was still standing. Some of the stones had been taken away. I spotted a piece of stone and took it with me. I stopped at the mobile home and left a note that we had been there and that we had taken a stone from the chimney. Later, we made contact and the lady has been on Morning Minute for several years now. We haven’t communicated in a while and I hope she is ok.  We went back a third time, and no one was home. A new house had been built on the concrete slab.

IT WAS AT FALLING SPRINGS BAPTIST CHURCH that I first learned about Jesus, the Rock and the importance of a house being built on a rock. Grandpa knew that, and he only had a third-grade education. When he died, the church house was full and running over. He was a community and family rock. He wasn’t bossy, but he knew where his boundaries were, and you didn’t cross them. He was a rock, and he knew The Rock.

BUT, MY MAIN INTRODUCTION TO THE ROCK, was my 2nd grade teacher: Miss Vaughn. She had us to memorize John 3:16 and recite it every day for four months. And the next four months we recited John 3:17 with it.

WE MOVED AFTER THAT TO MOUNTAIN CITY, TENNESSEE where my daddy ran a dogwood mill that made shuttles for weaving cloth: tents, uniforms, parachutes and bedding for soldiers. My 3rd grade year was bad. I wanted to be accepted by the new boys in the new place and I practiced cussin’ so I could be one of them. I didn’t yet know the Lord, although I knew John 3:16-17.  I learned to cuss real good. The next year, in October, 1943, a maverick Presbyterian preacher held a meeting in a bean market. Farmers sold their bean crops in that market.

WHEN THE FROST CLOSED DOWN THE BEAN PICKING, Dan Graham began the meeting. I went every night to hear the stories he told. I got saved and went to school the next day telling everybody about it. Several days I told them. They had had enough of my preaching and at recess one morning, the boys put me on the ground and worked me over pretty good.

I THOUGHT EVERYBODY WOULD BE GLAD to hear the Jesus story and want to get saved. Well, it didn’t turn out that way. But I’ve just continued to tell the story to anybody that would listen, ‘cause it’s the best story I ever heard; 75 years now.

THIS THANKSGIVING, I HAVE A LOT TO BE THANKFUL FOR. Actually, I have Thanksgiving every time I walk by that limestone rock at the corner of our house that came out of the chimney in Medlock Hollow where I was born. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I did have the advantage of being born in Medlock Hollow. I go back there a lot, almost every day and visit my heritage. It also reminds me of the Rock that is higher than I. Ω
 

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Read Through the Bible in a Year
 NOVEMBER 19, 2018 - MONDAY
 A.M Ezekiel 20-21   P.M James 1
(Bible Gateway will read this to you if you like. Look for the speaker icon.)

Good Verse to Memorize:  
From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.  (Psalm 61:2)
 
Song for Today: 
Lead Me to the Rock (3:27) (Stephen Hill & Gaither Group)  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmHBj_WeBmY     
 You may have to adjust the volume and delete Ad.

Many people have posted their version of Lead Me to the Rock on YouTube. I’m picky, and often disappointed in selecting music. Sometimes I spend a half-hour looking for a song.  I audited 12-15 groups and settled on Stephen Hill and the Gaither Group. Stephen is a gifted tenor and a bit rowdy in his singing style…was probably that way when he was three. I learned this song from a quartet in a library of music I bought before any of my children were born, maybe from J. T. Adams, 62 years ago.

As we approach Thanksgiving, I have to go back to my roots at Medlock and to a rock I brought from there that’s at the corner of our house in the flower bed at Flat Rock. I look at it every few days and remember where I came from, God’s perfect place for me, and the root of my thanksgiving. 
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