Going Back
It would only be a few minutes out of our way. We were traveling from Edmonton and we were on our way home. I decided that I wanted to show our boys were I had spent my growing up years. As we drove toward the farm I noticed how things had changed. When we arrived at the river we no longer had to stop and wait for the ferry to come to take us across the wide North Saskatchewan River. The road was no longer a gravel road but was now a secondary highway. As we passed through our small town I noticed that the railroad tracks were now gone.
As we drove up to the farm I noticed that there were other things that had changed. Where our farm had stood there was not one single building standing. Our front yard, our backyard, our grandparents yard was all a field of wheat. I got out of the car with my four sons and we walked to the middle of the field that had once been our farmyard and there I stood looking around. Though the buildings were gone the memories were still there.
As I looked to my left I could see our neighbour’s farm still standing about half a kilometre to the north. I remembered the number of times we rode with them to school or we helped them with their farm machinery. I thought about a dog we had who whenever we started up our old truck would run as quickly as possible to our neighbour’s farm to take a piece of wood from their wood pile and try and make in back to our yard before their dogs could catch him. This was a game he loved to play even though we never understood why he did it. As soon as the truck started he would take off for the neighbour’s yard to steal a log of wood. He would taunt the neighbour’s dogs so that they would chase him back to our yard. It was a sense of accomplishment for him to get the wood safely to our yard. However, he always took the wood back when we shut off the truck.
I turned and looked to my right where my grandparents’ house had stood. Again there was nothing but wheat. Their house was gone, the barn was gone, the machine shed was gone, the granaries were gone, even the line of trees that separated my grandparents’ house from the barn was gone. As I looked south I remembered my father’s parents who lived on the farm with us. The farm had originally belong to them but when they became to old to work the farm any longer it was passed onto their only son, my father.
I remembered one spring day when my younger brother was about four years old. Our farm was a mixed farm and we had grain as well as animals. The chickens often roamed around the yard looking for food. My brother was afraid of the roosters so he would watch from our backdoor until there were no roosters around and then he would head over to grandma’s house. He would hang around her house for awhile until he got bored and wanted to go home. My grandmother was not a patient woman and she was glad when he decided that he wanted to go back to our house. However, there was one problem. Usually when he decided it was time to go home the roosters were back and he was afraid to go home by himself so my grandmother had to take him home. This did not improve her attitude.
My grandparents had a friend that would often walk down to visit them for the afternoon and in the evening my father would drive him home. Around suppertime my grandmother heard granddad coming in the house and she could hear him talking to someone in the back porch. Thinking it was her grandson coming back again she called out to granddad in a load voice, “Send him home. He only comes over here and makes a nuisance of himself and then someone has to take him home. Send him home.” You can only imagine her embarrassment when she heard their friend say, “Tut, tut” and granddad walked in with their dear old friend.
I then turned back and looked to where our house had once stood. Many memories flooded my mind but one in particular stood out at that time when I was 5 years old.
My father and my two older brothers had gone to church that November evening and my mother stayed home with the rest of us. I was getting ready for bed and my mother came to hear me say my prayers. She took time that evening to talk to me about my relationship with God and with the simple faith of a child I asked Jesus to be my Saviour. When you are five years old your life doesn’t change very much but over the years I have often looked back at that time and remembered that it was that night that I had committed myself to be a follower of the Carpenter from Nazareth.
Suddenly I felt a tug at my pant leg and one of my boys said, “Let’s go daddy, there is nothing here.” In one way he was right but in a different way there was more there than I could ever begin to explain.
I am reminded that God’s people often set up memorials so that they could go back and remember what God had done for them. In Deuteronomy 8 Moses stresses to the people that they should not forget the Lord their God and what He did for them. To help them remember he told them to set up memorials so that when their children saw the memorials and asked what they meant then the parents were to use that moment as a teaching moment. During the time that Joshua led the people in conquest of the land of Caanan he kept bringing them back to Gilgal the place where he had set up a memorial when they first came into the land. That memorial was to remind them of God’s faithfulness to them.
Samuel set up memorial and called it Ebenezar which means “hither to has God helped us”. He knew that people would soon forget so the memorial was to help them remember that God was their helper.
What do you do when you cannot go back? I think that it is important to set up other reminders that will transport us back mentally to those places of decision. There was nothing on that piece of land to remind of what had happened there over fifty years ago but in my mind’s eye it was still there. We need reminders so that we will remember God’s faithfulness.
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