The Sunday Letter
There is a week at the tail end of every Southern summer when the college towns down here seem to fill up overnight. The streets that were quiet all July are suddenly full of cars with license plates from everywhere, boxes and mini-fridges balanced on dollies, parents walking a little slower than their children. Move-in week. The start of it all.
I had the chance this week to be around a whole crowd of these new students, most of them just landing for their first week of college, and a good many of them setting foot in the South for the very first time in their lives. You can spot the first-timers. There is a certain look a person gets when they have just stepped off a plane or out of a long car ride into that thick August air, blinking at the heat, not quite sure yet what they have gotten themselves into.
And then something happens, and it happens faster than you would think. I watched it all week. A student who drove down from somewhere up north, wound tight and worn out from the move, ends up in a conversation with a stranger who is in no particular hurry to be anywhere else. Somebody points them toward the good barbecue and insists, gently, that they try the sweet tea. They notice the way people say hello to them on the sidewalk, the way a shopkeeper asks how they’re settling in and actually waits for the answer. They see the live oaks and the porches and the light coming down soft in the evening.
One young man I met had not even set foot on the campus yet. He had only just arrived, still had not seen the place he had crossed the country to attend, and already he was fully in love with the new home he had found for himself. He could not stop talking about it. Not the buildings, not the classes, none of that yet. It was the feel of the place that had gotten hold of him, the people and the warmth and the ease of it, and he knew, before he had even really begun, that he had come to the right place.
By the end of the week, more of them than I can count told me some version of the same thing. That they felt, somehow, already at home. That they had braced for a place that would be foreign to them, and instead found a place that reached out and pulled them in.
That is the thing about the South I keep coming back to, and it is the reason for this whole letter, every week. We are, all of us down here, busy and hurried the same as anybody. There is nothing slow about a college move-in, nothing relaxed about the first week of a semester. And yet underneath the hurry there is a way of being that does not let go of you. A willingness to stop and talk. A porch that is always worth sitting on. A meal that is meant to be lingered over. A pace of soul, if not of schedule.
I got to watch a couple hundred young people discover that this week, most of them without even knowing that was what they were feeling. They came as strangers. They will leave, four years from now, as Southerners of a kind, carrying a little of this place with them wherever they go. That is no small thing to be part of. It might be the best thing about living here.
Until next Sunday,
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
In just about every church I have ever known, there is a person who gets there before everybody else. You have probably never met them, and that is rather the point. They come in while it is still dark, flip on the lights, set the heat or the air to where it ought to be, start the coffee, straighten the chairs somebody left crooked the week before. By the time the rest of us arrive, the room is warm and lit and ready, and we walk into it without a single thought for how it got that way.
Nobody claps for that person. There is no line in the bulletin for it. Most weeks, nobody even knows their name. And yet the whole morning rests, quietly, on what they did in the dark when no one was watching.
I think about that kind of faithfulness a good deal, because I suspect most of the truly important work in this world is exactly that kind. It is unseen. It is unthanked. It is the meal carried to a grieving family, the phone call made to somebody lonely, the bill paid without a word, the prayer whispered for a person who will never know it was prayed. Small things. Hidden things. The sort of things that never make it onto anybody’s list of accomplishments.
We live in a time that is very loud about being seen. And it is easy to let that convince us that the unseen things do not count for much. But Scripture says the opposite, plainly:
“For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do.” — Hebrews 6:10
Read that again. He is not unjust so as to overlook it. The God who made the galaxies does not lose track of the small, quiet kindness you did that nobody else noticed. He was in the room. He saw it. He does not forget.
I have done a fair amount of striving in my life for the kind of work that gets noticed, and I will tell you honestly it has never once satisfied me the way I thought it would. The things that have mattered most, looking back, were almost always the small ones. The ones nobody saw.
So if you are one of those people who keeps showing up in the dark to turn the lights on, and you have wondered lately whether any of it matters, let me tell you what I have come to believe is true. It matters. It is seen. And the light you keep leaving on for other people is a light that has never once been overlooked by the One who counts. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.