Rocky Top

LORD, You are my portion and my cup of blessing; You hold my future. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. – Psalm 16:5,6

On the television show Bonanza, the Cartwrights often traveled to California from their home in Nevada, but their trips were almost always to San Francisco. I do not remember the episode or the context, but Hoss once traveled down to southern California. He remarked on the barrenness of it, and someone asked if he had ever seen California. He replied that he had been to California many times, but he doubted that anyone would ever want to live in such an ugly place as Los Angeles. I remember the first time I left the Spring green hills of the Ozarks driving to LA. My thoughts were much like those Hoss expressed. Yet some people love the high desert or the coasts, the plains or the mountains, or even the cold, frozen north lands. I have heard people call swamp land in central Wisconsin “God’s Country”. I have heard others say the same thing about desolate plains around Midland and Odessa, Texas or places along the Gulf Coast where the mosquitoes could be mistaken for buzzards if they flew a little higher. I think they’re all crazy. Everybody knows God lives just a little northeast of Cedar Gap, Missouri. Even the devil keeps a weekend place over the border in Arkansas.

When it comes to landscapes and vistas, “home” makes up for a lot of deficiencies. In that sense, we can all understand the psalmist when he says, “I have a beautiful inheritance.”

In other realms, we may not be so inclined to think well of the heritage bequeathed to us. Many of us look back on regrettable scenes that closed doors or burned bridges. We may have reason to wish that we could live some pivotal moment again, making a different decision in a second pass. Our boundary lines may seem a little restrictive, and the ground we are left to till may seem rocky and hard.

Still, we are here. Here. And the opportunity to experience joy and peace is ours at this moment precisely because the lines are drawn as they are.

If I have regrets, sitting where I am today, they are not for me, but for the trouble and pain I may have caused someone else. Every hurt and failure that I suffered I now see as a stone of remembrance, a landmark establishing the lines of my inheritance, bringing me to this place which the Lord has given me. There are others, no doubt, with more spacious abodes where the soil is deeper and richer and better watered. Still, I have my little place with its small, but inexhaustible spring of living water, and it will produce all that I need, in abundance.