Bill has a bright red 1973 Chevrolet Impala convertible that he bought in, you guessed it, in 1973. We put about a thousand miles a year on by driving it around the Indiana country sides on summer evenings. Our fifty-year-old son was three when we got that car. His sister Amy was four and Suzanne was eight. Back then we would buckle them in and cover their legs with the blue and green quilt we kept from the motor home, and sing our way through the fields of winter wheat, corn, and soy beans to the accompaniment of crickets and cicadas until the sunset faded. Then we would make our way back into town and stop for chocolate and vanilla twist ice cream cones at Dortee’s. This ritual has been celebrated now for over 47 years in the same red convertible.
Photo by Angela Kellogg
Now we take the youngest grandkids on the same adventure. The magic moment of the trip is when Bill slows down somewhere along County Road 400 and pulls into a well worn path. He turns off the engine and says, “Shh, do you hear it?”
Like they’ve never done it before, the kids, grown or small, get quiet, quiet enough to hear the sound of fresh cold water gurgling up from some deep place through a pipe someone stuck into the Indiana clay out and down into the pebbles below. We listen. “Where does it come from?” Mia or Liam is sure to ask again. “Who knows,” Bill always answers, “Deep in the ground. It’s been flowing from that source for as long as my grandpa could remember. Want to get a drink?”
There’s a place, a place in the human spirit, when we can always go to be surprised by hope in the most unlikely of circumstances at the times when hope seems impossible to find. There’s always a spring coming from the deep places, a well of living water bursting to the surface of our days. No matter how unwise the choices that may have led us to our places of despair, there is always a road back home. Friends may dessert us, promises may be broken, lost can become a way of life, but the Father has provided a spring along our journey if we will just stop there, get still enough to hear, and honest enough to admit our thirst. There is always, there is always a place called hope.
