There are still places

where man has not yet managed

to make himself the center of everything.

No pavement.

No steeple.

No microphone.

Just mountains rising out of the earth

like they have been standing watch

since before anyone thought to name them.

A river working its way through stone

long before anyone was there to watch it.

Tundra turning gold in the early cold.

Snow gathering on peaks

no hand has ever shaped.

Then the sun drops behind the range

and sets the whole sky on fire.

Another day,

a rainbow stretches across miles of Alaska

with nobody there to improve it.

That may be the humbling part.

None of it needs us.

The mountain does not care who you are.

The river does not know your résumé.

The wilderness has no interest

in the little kingdoms we spend our lives building.

The titles.

The corner offices.

The names on the door.

You stand there long enough

and something begins to shrink.

Hopefully it is you.

Weybo went into that country

after the fourteenth of the North American 29.

The Dall sheep had been the thirteenth.

This time it was the Alaska-Yukon moose,

the largest member of the deer family on earth.

A long way from Baker County.

A long way from the courthouse,

the flat fields,

the heat that hangs on into fall.

He walked forty miles in eight days.

Calling.

Listening.

Calling again.

Eating berries where he found them

and rations he had put together

before he ever left home.

For eight days

the wild said very little back.

On the eighth day of ten,

with the hunt nearly spent,

the bull answered.

Fifty inches is the mark for a big bull.

This one went sixty-eight,

carrying paddles

wider than his own body.

One shot.

Two hundred eighty-eight yards.

And the valley went quiet.

Sixty-eight inches will go in the book.

That may not be the part

that stays with a man.

Because somewhere between the valleys,

the weather,

and the distance,

the caller becomes the one being called.

Not by an animal.

By creation itself.

Paul wrote that the invisible things of God

are clearly seen

in the things that are made.

So that we are without excuse.

He did not mean it as a compliment.

He meant it as a verdict.

Nobody gets to say

they were never told.

The sermon has been hanging over every ridge

since the first morning.

Maybe that is why the wilderness feels holy.

Not because God lives there

more than anywhere else.

He is just as near

over a peanut field in Baker County

as over any mountain in Alaska.

The difference is

there is less of us out there

to block the view.

And here is the mercy in it.

Being small is not the punishment.

It is the relief.

Nothing out there

was ever waiting on you

to hold it up.

The wild has been preaching

since the beginning.

It never raised its voice.

It never passed a plate.

It simply kept telling the truth

until a man from southwest Georgia,

eight days into calling out,

got quiet enough

to hear what had been calling him.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.”

Romans 1:20

Boutwell Jones
Red Clay Gospel

By five, she had already been working two hours.

Coffee brewing.
Pastries set out.
Small things moved until they looked right.

Her supervisor stopped by to check on her.

There was nothing to check.

Every trip, every morning,
I come down for the family’s coffee.

Four lattes, at least.
Two vanilla. Two caramel.
Oat milk in every one.

She knows the order by now.

Four lattes take a while.

So I ask her something,
and she gives me the whole story.

Where she is from.
How her brother is doing at Bella.
Her whole week, start to finish.

Then she sets all four on a plate,
lids and all,
so I can get them back to the family
without a spill.

She paints.
She sings.
She dances.

I have seen the paintings.

But most mornings her canvas is a coffee station,
finished before the rest of us
are awake enough to see it.

Six days a week.
Sometimes seven.

When she gets a day off,
she cooks and cleans
and calls her family back in Tepoztlán.

She has learned more languages than I ever will.

Someday she will be somewhere else,
making something entirely her own.

I hope so.

But this morning,
while it was yet night in Cabo,
the coffee was hot,
the pastries were out,
and the small things had been moved
until they looked right.

Nobody asked her to.

The first thing I ever asked her,
three years ago,
was how to say her name.

“Any,” she said.
“Like Orphan Annie.”

She has been answering ever since.

Boutwell Jones
Red Clay Gospel

Cabo. Before light.
I walked out with the phone.

The moon was four percent.
A rind. A clipping. Almost gone.

I took the picture anyway.

The whole circle came back.
Gray and complete inside the bright edge.

Earth had been throwing sunlight back at it.

The part I called dark
was catching light from where I stood.

Jupiter held above it.

Then the sky went gray at the water line.

Boutwell Jones
Red Clay Gospel

Top row (L-R): Roughrider, Jeff Thaggard, Eddie from Buffalo’s Tallahassee, Uncle Joseph Walter Jones,

Front Row (L-R): Shane (Boutwell Jones), John Bradley, Mack Mitchell, and Frog.

The photograph was taken around 1992.

Eight of us on the dock at midday. A pink laundry basket. White sneakers gone dark at the toe.
Reds laid out on the concrete in a pile that went on longer than the frame could hold.

Rough Rider was there.
Uncle Joey was there.
They called me Ice at the time but that era was melting away….
I am the shirtless one kneeling in front of Rough Rider, holding the kingfish like it weighed something.

There was Mack. John Bradley. Jeff Thaggard. Eddie from Buffalo’s in Tallahassee.
And Frog.

That alone should tell you this was not a board meeting.

I was in Athens then, still a college student.
I would come home and go south with these men,
out toward the Gulf after grouper and red snapper.

J. Lovic Jones had fished those waters.
The L in H&L was Lovic.
The plant sat in Pelham, Georgia, but the roads ran much farther.
Albany. Valdosta. Tallahassee.
Then Monticello. Dothan. Panama City Beach.
Red clay on one end. Red Hills on the other.

Food moved through it. People moved through it. Families did too.

The trucks were already feeding kitchens whose names would become familiar later.
Guthrie’s was already on the road.
Layne’s in College Station meant nothing to any of us yet.
My daughter would graduate from Florida State and love Tallahassee.
My son would go to College Station.
Friends would settle there.
Family already had.
The same names and places kept showing up decades later,
as if the map had been drawn before any of us learned to read it.

You think you are going fishing.
You think somebody is just running a route.
You think a warehouse in Pelham is only a warehouse.
Then enough years pass.
You look at an old photograph.
A marina. A pile of fish.

A pink basket somebody will carry home.
And Lovic still running through all of it.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

What I’ve Learned: 6–10

6. No one is coming to save you.

7. No one has it figured out.

8. We are all jacked up.

9. Stay humble, stay thirsty, and reach for the stars.

10. Smile and tell someone today that they matter and that God has a plan for them.

Coaching life was fantastastical for me.

I was able to be a full-time athletic director, a head coach, and fortunate enough to spend a lot of years around young people, including my own.

Over the span of two and a half decades, I met many.

I taught some things.

I learned far more.

The road was rocky and murky at times.

With the kids came the family, or maybe better said, the team around the athlete.

That is where the fun really began.

During my years coaching softball in Atlanta, I remember a mother and father walking up to me after practice upset about their daughter’s development.

She was six.

Six years old, playing 6U fast-pitch softball.

Neither parent had played organized sports, but they had very specific ideas about the drills we should run, the techniques we should use, and how their daughter needed to be developed.

I listened.

For thirty-five minutes.

I thanked them for their time and watched them walk back toward the parking lot.

My two assistant coaches, both former Major League Baseball players, were standing nearby.

One of them smiled and said something close to:

“You’re welcome to bench my kid next game and let that star family shine for a few games.”

So we did.

The next couple of games were a disaster.

Not long after that, the family left in search of a better coach and a better team.

Over the next ten years, I watched them spend what had to be a small fortune on lessons, training and travel sports.

I remember thinking later that if all that money had gone into an account for her, college tuition, books, room and board might have been sitting there waiting when she graduated from high school.

Turns out she did not need sports to tell her who she was….

The girl could paint.

Really paint.

She became a “successful” artist. Because that is all sports really is at the end of the day….entertainment art…and we all have a responsibility to foster that artistic side.

We were all staring at the softball field trying to figure out how to develop the athlete.

Her gift was somewhere else entirely.

My wife, Christy, developed a philosophy during those years that stuck with me and still does:

“Use sports. Don’t let sports use you.”

I understood that line better as I got older.

Later in my coaching career, the need to be right had faded.

What mattered more was making sure young people had a chance to enjoy the game and find their place in it.

Sometimes that meant cutting a kid from a team where meaningful playing time was never going to come.

Sometimes it meant adding a JV or freshman squad so more kids could play at a level where they could actually get on the field or the floor.

Maturity did not give me the power to change human behavior.

It did not make parents see what I saw.

It did not make kids see it either.

And it certainly did not make the team surrounding the athlete understand every decision I made.

The only thing I really had was the truth behind my motives.

And the willingness to look a kid in the face and tell them the truth.

Maybe that was part of coaching too.

A small introduction to adulthood.

Life is not always fair.

Everybody does not make the team.

Everybody does not start.

Sometimes you work hard and somebody else is still better.

Sometimes the answer is no.

And no one, I mean no one, is coming to save you.

I remember seeing one young man in public after he had quit one of my teams.

He had not quit because he wasn’t having fun.

His dad wasn’t having fun.

There is a difference.

When I saw him, I could see disappointment in him.

Maybe even regret.

Years earlier, I might have wanted him to know that I had been right.

By then I did not need that anymore.

I looked him in the eyes and told him the truth.

The same truth I had tried to tell him when he was on the team.

That is about all any coach really has at the end of the day.

The truth.

And whether the kid standing in front of you believes you cared enough to tell it.

Now I have the luxury of looking back over all those years.

The regrets are few.

The joys are many.

I think I stay on LinkedIn mostly for the former players who still use the moniker “Coach” when they greet me or send a congratulatory note.

There is something about that word.

I was so much older in my playing days than I am now after the experience of coaching.

The lessons and development opportunities continue to pile up, somehow moving from the pages of my mind toward my heart.

That’s the crux.

Show me your passions and I’ll show you your heart.

Show me your priorities and eventually they will expose the motives behind many of your actions and reactions.

Connect the two and eventually they tell the truth about you.

So if you get a chance to coach, if you find the time to lead or teach or train, understand that you have taken on both a calling and a responsibility.

Being married isn’t easy.

Parenting is the toughest job I have ever known.

But coaching, being called Coach, refined me.

It exposed the shadows and the motives.

For better and for worse, it showed me parts of myself I might otherwise have missed.

James warned people not to rush toward becoming teachers because teachers would be held to a stricter standard.

I understand that better now too.

There is weight in being the person standing in front of somebody else.

Especially a kid.

First you learn how to coach the game.

Then you learn how to coach the kid.

Eventually you learn that neither the game nor the kid belongs to you.

They may forget the score.

They may forget the drill.

They may even forget what you told them.

But there is a decent chance they will remember how it felt when you believed in them.

And every once in a while, twenty-five years later, they will see you somewhere or send you a note and call you Coach.

That may be enough.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Some things I’ve learned as I get closer to 6 decades on earth….Top 5…

1. You only have today, right now, the present. Best to treat this time as a gift and not a curse.

2. Breathing is not optional but breathing fresh air and exhaling the air in a healthy manner is a choice.

3. Love time but limit it for seasons, family, and those friends you may not have much longer because…

4. 80 percent of people don’t care and the other 20 percent are actively looking to spread toxins and poison into the ecosystem

5. If you don’t have something nice to say, at least make sure it’s true and delivered in love and empathetic tone. You never know what some one is dealing with and you may find yourself in need of a return favor. When this one seems confusing, re-read 1-4 above.
   
   

   Someone Buttoned His Shirt

   Kierkegaard believed there comes a place where the crowd can no longer carry your faith.
   
   The boy did not know enough to doubt anything.
   
   Someone combed his hair.
   Someone buttoned his shirt.
   Someone told him about God.
   
   But God had already found him
   on a cinder block at the old farm on Highway 97,
   in a lightning storm,
   before anybody thought to explain it.
   
   Then vacation Bible school at Hopeful Baptist.
   A prayer card in his hand.
   The walk down front.
   
   He signed what had already burned through him.

   

   
   
   They wanted a record.
   He gave them one.
   
   There were churches then.
   Sunday schools.
   People who knew the answers.
   
   He grew up.
   
   Some of the answers did not.
   
   There were years when faith came easily
   because everybody around him was saying the same words.
   
   Then came the places nobody could go with him.
   
   Loss.
   Fear.
   Marriage.
   Nights awake.
   
   The long work of becoming a man
   when nobody was watching.
   
   The boy is an old photograph now.

   

   
   
   Gray beard.
   Weathered skin.
   A cross against his chest.

   

   
   
   The card is gone.
   
   The cross came with him.
   The crowd did not.
   
   The boy is still looking straight ahead.
   
   Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

There comes an hour when the road stops pretending it goes on forever…..

Granny Sue lived in a cinder block home with two and half porches and she would strategically turn on the lights…

…whether any one was coming home or not.

You just never knew.

One light is practical, but multiple lights is a pattern.

I never asked her about it.

You do not ask a woman why she does the things she does. I have found the result of the question may cause you much pondering and processing that is needless.

You just notice the yard is never completely dark and that you can find the steps without feeling for them.

Some call that hour darkness.

I am unsure.

Night makes some lights easier to see.

Maybe the promise was never that darkness would remain absent or forget to arrive at the station.

Maybe it was only that somebody is still turning them on for you to see.

Boutwell Jones

First Came the telescope…

Then a star chart.

Then a red flashlight so the chart would not ruin my eyes.

Granny Sue did not know the physics. She knew the names.

Out there the sky started at the fence lines and seemed to roll on forever…

She pointed with her whole arm, the way you point at something you expect a child to find.

The cigarette, meanwhile, remained in the other hand.

Orion in the winter. The dippers turning through the year (little and big). The seven stars in the cold.

She never explained what any of it meant.

She bought tools for a boy to see things she could not reach and would not live to see him reach either.

I still call them the Seven Sisters.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Recent picture of Madison, Hanna, and AK. Our family was blessed in the summer of 2023 to learn all about Occupational Therapy and how these three are perfect fits for the profession.

Hanna left first each morning.
Georgia Rose learned the sound of her leaving
and met her at the door.

Long days learning the work.
Evenings back at the house.
Three plates in the sink by nine.

Then summer ended.

Hanna went one way.
Madison another.
AK another.

There would be patients.
Marriages.
New cities.

For a while after,
Georgia Rose still went to the door in the morning
and waited.

Boutwell Jones

The redclaygospel.com series will continue as the journey unfolds….exciting!

The moon came up when the music started.

Nobody planned that part.

I had flown into Colorado before most reasonable people were awake. Crack of dawn. At Scott and Melissa Fortson’s house in Broomfield by eight, laptop open not long after. Work all day. Somewhere beyond the screen, rain moved across the Front Range.

Scott and I met in college. We both married our college sweethearts young. Had children young.

He and Melissa had Will and Ben.
Christy and I had AK and Stephen.

Then life started moving us around.

Georgia to Florida to Texas for us.
Georgia to Tennessee to Florida to Colorado for them.

Some friendships survive because people stay close.

Others survive because distance never quite gets the final word.

By late afternoon, Scott, Ben and I were headed toward Morrison to meet my brother Jay. The rain had just moved through.

And there he was.

Thirty-seven years old now.

Billy Strings shirt.
Big smile.
A rainbow behind him.

You cannot manufacture an entrance like that.

We walked through the Red Rocks museum before the show. Jay and I drifted naturally toward the Hall of Fame.

Old concerts.
Old ghosts.
Names that had climbed these rocks before us.

Then the mountain shows.

Woodstock.

Yasgur’s farm, baby.

Maybe brothers recognize the same things even when seventeen years separate them.

Outside, the storm had done something useful.

It had washed Colorado clean.

Low sixties.
No humidity.

The clouds lifted enough that from Row Forty we could see for miles.

Denver sat out there in the distance.

The rocks rose around us.

The wind howled through them.

Then Goose walked out and opened with Eminence Front.

There are introductions.

And then there are declarations.

The first notes went into those rocks like they had been waiting there awhile.

Scott had never seen Goose.

Ben had never seen Red Rocks.

Jay had never seen Red Rocks.

Ben had just finished a tour with the Marines. I had known him his whole life, back when neither Scott nor I could have imagined sitting beside our grown sons in places like this.

He looked blown away.

So did Jay.

Probably all of us.

Then somewhere over the south to southwest horizon, the moon appeared.

Massive.

Orange-red and impossibly large, hanging just above the distant horizon. A thin ribbon of cloud crossed its face.

And almost as soon as we noticed it, the earth began taking it away.

Goose moved into Rockdale.

Sixteen minutes.

The song stretched and wandered and built while the shadow kept moving.

Then Rockdale gave way to Silver Rising.

That was the moment.

The eclipse had begun in earnest.

Silver Rising beneath a blood-red moon.

A song about something changing under moonlight, played beneath a moon visibly changing above us.

You could not have programmed it better.

For a few minutes Red Rocks stopped feeling like a venue.

It became theater.

Not the kind with curtains.

The older kind.

Stone.
Wind.
Darkness.
Music.

And something happening in the heavens that nobody on the stage controlled.

The show kept moving.

Strange Overtones.
Spirit of the Dark Horse.
(7hunder).
Dragonfly.

The wind kept coming hard through Row Forty.

But the band somehow held the balance.

Weather on one side.
Sound on the other.

Neither won.

By the second set the moon was no longer enormous on the horizon.

It was higher now.

Smaller somehow.

And darker.

The earth’s shadow had moved farther across it.

Thatch went somewhere else entirely, with those little flashes that sounded like Dire Straits floating through the jam.

Then Madhuvan opened another door.

Fish in the Sea.
Red Bird.
Wysteria Lane.

Long songs becoming longer.

The moon becoming something different.

Every few minutes I looked away from the stage.

There it was.

Another piece gone.

Then another.

Four men in Row Forty watching two shows at once.

Scott beside a son I had known since he was a boy.

Me beside a brother who was not born when Scott and I first met.

College boys become husbands.
Husbands become fathers.
Boys become Marines.
Little brothers become men.

Georgia becomes Tennessee.
Florida becomes Texas.
Colorado becomes home.

And somehow, decades later, everybody winds up in the same row.

Maybe that was the eclipse I came to see.

Not something disappearing.

Something passing across everything that had been there all along.

Time moves slowly enough that most days you do not notice.

Then occasionally life gives you a night when you can actually see the shadow moving.

The encore came.

The crowd began filing toward the stairs.

I looked back out over the rocks.

The moon was finishing the last touches of the eclipse.

Almost the whole concert.

From moonrise to encore.

Nobody hurried away.

At least that is how I remember it.

Maybe because some nights deserve an extra minute.

The rain had passed.

The air was cool.

The humidity was gone.

The wind had spent itself against the music.

Behind us were the stage and the rocks.

Ahead of us were Denver and that moon.

Scott.
Ben.
Jay.
Me.

A friend from college.

His son.

My little brother.

And a man old enough now to understand that you do not get many nights when everybody you love stays exactly where you can see them.

The shadow passed.

The moon remained.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

He sits with the little ones.
Lets them touch his ears.
Makes hard rooms a little easier.

At night he goes back to being
the King of Austin,
the Midnight Rider,
still monitoring for threats nobody else can see.

He comes home to Georgia Anne Rose
and Fight Club starts again.

Grandmama Christy calls him her handsome boy.

His granddaddy requires considerable supervision.

Three years ago,
AK picked the orange collar boy.

She could not have picked better.

The world got Finnegan Noles Jones.

The infamous leg out photo vibe thanks to Aunt Georgia Rose Jones.

Boutwell Jones
Red Clay Gospel

redclaygospel.com

Picture taken in Saint Augustine where we lived 2013 to 2018 and I got my eyesight back after two surgeries. The fountain of youth is literally a stones throw away from this cross and the clinic I had my procedures done as well.

Some apologies are older than the mistake.

They learned their words in childhood, when a voice filled the kitchen and the quiet after was worse.

So the boy learned to say I am sorry before he knew what he had done. The house is quiet now. The words still come running.

I was wrong. I will make it right. I am not afraid of you.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Elizabeth Jones Reed Napier has been dead for more than ninety years.

She is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia, not far from the Ocmulgee River.

Her headstone bears her name.
Elizabeth Reed.

Sometime around 1969, Dickey Betts saw it.
He needed a name for an instrumental he had written, and Elizabeth Reed became the name he borrowed.
She could not have known what was coming.
Neither could the stone.

Long before I knew that story, I knew Macon for something else.

Ball.

For a kid coming up from southwest Georgia, Macon was where the big schools were. Coach Graham Lowe believed in playing up, so our Westwood teams went looking for people we probably had no business playing.
Mount de Sales. Tattnall Square. Stratford. Westfield. FPD. Windsor.

The old Macon Coliseum.
We won those games.

At Tattnall we broke their home winning streak, twenty-six to fifteen. I threw for two touchdowns, ran for another, and at some point had to chase down a kid considerably faster than I was to keep him from scoring.
There is probably a lesson about humility in having one of your better football memories involve tackling somebody who had just run away from you.

My senior year we came within one shot of playing for the state championship.
We had already beaten Stratford and Westfield.
Windsor was waiting on the other side.
A young Jason Aldean was on that Windsor team, although none of us knew there was any reason to remember that.
He was another kid playing ball.
Macon was full of people like that.
People who would become something later.

I did not know then that another kind of improvisation had been happening all over that city for years.
I had actually been learning it most of my life.
My grandparents, Granny Sue and O’Neal, helped underwrite juke joints back home.
I was young, but I remember those places.
Live music.
Improvised comedy.
People you might see on an ordinary afternoon suddenly coming alive when they stepped in front of a room.
There was no great announcement that art was about to occur.
Somebody just got up there and did something.
Then somebody else answered.
The room joined in.
That world eventually helped give me The Bees of Baker County, although I did not understand at the time that I was collecting anything.
I was just watching.

There was music everywhere in the family.
Having seventeen sets of aunts and uncles will expose a child to a fairly unreasonable amount of humanity.
And records.
Otis Redding was there.
So were the Fifth Dimension, Earth, Wind and Fire and early Steve Miller.

Through Penny West’s Baker County family came Zeppelin, the Stones and Pink Floyd.

KFran took me to shows at the Albany Civic Center.
Hank Williams Jr.
Alabama.
Skynyrd.
The Allman Brothers.

Hank was drunk the night we saw him.
At some point he lit a joint on stage.
KFran told me afterward it was a cigarette.
I was young enough to take her word for it.
Years later I read that the show got him banned from the building for a while.
She was not protecting me.
She was protecting Bocephus.

Nobody sat me down and explained Southern music.
Thank God.
They just played it.
Somewhere along the way I started noticing that the best music did not always behave itself.
A song could begin as one thing and become another.
There might be a melody everybody recognized, but then somebody would step away from it.
Another musician would follow.
The song would stretch.
Sometimes it seemed to disappear altogether.
And somehow they would find their way back.

Football had already taught me something about that.
There is a play in the huddle.
Everybody knows the play.
Then the ball is snapped and eleven people on the other side begin doing everything in their power to ruin it.
At that point the diagram becomes a suggestion.
You read.
You react.
You trust the people around you.
Sometimes the hole is not where it is supposed to be.
Sometimes the receiver breaks another way.
Sometimes everything collapses and you run.

My friend Wey Rooks got to Athens before I did.
He went there as a student in the mid-to-late eighties and found his people.
Nate.
Mike.
Duke.

One summer Brett, Wey’s younger brother, and I went up for his birthday.
By then Athens was already becoming Athens for me.
Widespread Panic was playing the Theatre.
And whatever had been planted back home was ready.

I usually found my way to Dave Schools’ side.
Partly because I could see Mikey Houser from there.
Mikey did not attack a guitar.
He seemed to stay inside a note longer than other people did.
That lingering lead.
I wanted to watch where it came from.
Schools was underneath it, pushing and pulling everything along.

Around the soundboard were the tapers, guarding their microphones and collecting nights the rest of us would otherwise have lost forever.
But I kept watching the women.
The dancers.
The spinners.
They were not dancing the way people dance when a band plays a song they like.
This was something else.
They seemed to be moving the music through the room.
A phrase would come off the stage and somehow enter them.
Arms.
Hair.
Skirts.
The floor was wet by the second set and nobody cared.
Then the crowd would move with them.
I did not have language for it.
I just knew the music was not stopping at the stage.

The room was playing too.

That is one of the things people misunderstand about live improvisational music.
They think the attraction is hearing a twenty-minute version of a song that could have been played in seven.
Sometimes, admittedly, that is exactly what is happening.
Not every journey requires three drum solos.
But on the right night something different occurs.
The musicians begin listening to one another so closely that composition turns into conversation.
One person says something.
Another answers.
Someone else leaves silence where a note could have gone.
The drummer changes the ground beneath everybody.
The bass finds a path through it.
The guitar starts wandering.
Nobody in the building, including the people playing, knows exactly what is coming next.

Dickey Betts understood that.
So did Duane Allman.
The Allman Brothers could take a composition and open the doors.
“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” became one of those doors.
There is a melody.
There is a structure.
There is a place to begin.
And then they leave.
Listen to the famous Fillmore East performance and there are moments when the original song seems almost beside the point.
Dickey moves.
Duane answers.
Berry Oakley finds them.
Butch Trucks and Jaimoe keep the whole thing from flying apart.
They are not men showing you how well they memorized something.
They are finding out what happens next.

Together.

Which makes the origin of the song even stranger.
Because the name came from a cemetery.
Rose Hill was a place the Allmans knew well. They wandered there. They wrote there. They spent time among those stones above the Ocmulgee.
Dickey saw Elizabeth Reed’s name and carried it away.
The woman herself had nothing to do with the song.
She simply left a name carved in Georgia stone.
That was enough.

Fifty years after Dickey Betts walked out of Rose Hill with that name, I can stand in a Billy Strings pit and recognize something I first saw in those women in Athens.
The music moves.
The people move with it.
Billy stretches a song past its expected boundaries and the room somehow understands what is happening.
Nobody needs instructions.

Some nights I look around almost as much as I look at the stage.
There are still dancers.
Still people with their eyes closed.
Still people who seem to know a turn is coming before it arrives.
Different generation.
Different room.
Same thing.

The music leaves the stage.
People carry it.
Then they give something back.

Maybe that is why recorded music, for all its perfection, can never quite replace this.
A recording remembers what happened.
Live music asks what might happen.
There is risk in that.

A musician has to leave the safety of the melody.
He has to trust the people beside him.
He has to listen.
Really listen.
That may be the hardest part.

The great improvisers are not necessarily the people who play the most notes.
Sometimes they are the people who know when not to play one.
Leave some room.
Let somebody else speak.
Follow when following is required.
Lead when the opening appears.
And when everything has wandered so far from home that nobody can quite see the road anymore, listen for something familiar.

Four notes.
A rhythm.
A phrase.
There.
Home.

I suppose I have spent much of my life around some version of that.
Juke joints in southwest Georgia.
Football fields in Macon.
Rooms in Athens.
Concert halls.
There was usually a plan.
Then somebody snapped the ball.
Life has been fairly consistent about that.
Very little happens exactly as drawn.
Maybe that is why this music has stayed with me.
A theme appears.
We follow it for a while.
We lose it.
Somebody leans in and tells us what just happened.
That the key changed.
That the band went somewhere we did not know they could go.
I have lost track of how many people did that for me.
Most of them were not trying to teach me anything.
They just did not want me to miss it.

Then, if we are fortunate, something familiar comes through the noise and we find our way back.
Down in Macon, the Ocmulgee still passes Rose Hill.
Duane Allman is buried there.
So is Gregg.
People come looking for them.
Some also walk over to an older grave bearing the name of a woman born in 1845.

Elizabeth Jones Reed Napier.

A guitarist saw her name.
A song borrowed it.
Musicians carried the song around the world.
Thousands of people danced to it.
Other musicians entered it and found things inside it that Dickey Betts could not possibly have planned.
And all the while, above the river in Macon, the place where it started never went anywhere.
The music wandered.
The stone stayed still.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Sunset picture taken with an iphone 4 decades ago by Christy.

There is a time of afternoon at Panama City Beach when people start drifting toward the balconies.

Nobody announces it. A few minutes earlier somebody is looking for a towel. Kids are coming up from the pool. Somebody wants pizza. Somebody else is trying to get the sand off his feet without bringing half the beach into the room.

Then the light changes.

And people start looking west.

Christy has always loved that part of the day. Especially at Edgewater. Especially from Tower II.

I knew Edgewater long before I knew her.

When I was a boy I swam in the lagoon pool not long after it was built. It seemed enormous to me. Maybe it still is. Childhood has a way of messing with the dimensions of things.

The lagoon sat in front of Tower I and beside Tower II, and Tower II had its own pool with a waterfall, which seemed like fairly advanced civilization to a kid from southwest Georgia.

Years later Edgewater became part of another ritual.

At Westwood, Junior-Senior was usually a Thursday night toward the end of April. When it was over, everybody headed south. Cars full of teenagers left Camilla for Panama City Beach and stayed through Sunday.

Mitchell-Baker had its crowd. Pelham had its crowd. The Americana had plenty of them.

We had Edgewater.

At that age nobody stands around contemplating the passage of time. We had other priorities.

But Ms. Nina Rooks and Ms. Juneille Rhodes understood something about the place that I did not.

They loved Tower II. They stayed up there while the rest of us went down to the water.

Nina had her chair turned toward the western glass. She had a book with her. Most of the afternoon the book stayed open on her knee and she did not read it. When we came up from the pool she would look over and tell us to come see the colors.

She was Basin royalty to me. Not because she had anything resembling a crown, although she could have carried one off. She was a Eubanks. She had that combination of intelligence, grace and strength that certain Southern women seem to come by without ever needing to explain it.

To Wey, Christa, and Brett she was Mother. To me she became something close to a second one. She trusted me like a son. Her home was open and her wisdom came without much ceremony.

And she loved that horizon.

Ms. Juneille did too.

I did not think much about any of it at the time. That is one of youth’s more impressive abilities. You can stand in the middle of something you will spend the rest of your life remembering and have no idea.

Then I went to Athens. I met Christy. We married. AK came along. Then Stephen.

And without ever planning it, I started taking my family back to the same place.

Edgewater.

Eventually Tower II.

The strange part is how fast my memories became theirs. The lagoon pool where I swam as a boy became the lagoon pool where AK and Stephen swam. The waterfall pool under Tower II became their pool.

Ocean’s. Pizza by the pool. Wet bathing suits hanging wherever wet bathing suits are not supposed to hang. Sand in everything. Elevator rides. The Gulf right there past the building.

And that pier.

Stephen was baptized in the Gulf outside Tower II. Then again in the lagoon pool for good measure.

Through all those years Christy kept watching the sunsets.

There was one particular view toward the pier she loved. When the afternoon started giving way, the Gulf would catch the light and the whole western horizon would begin changing colors. You could watch the sun work down until it seemed to settle into the water.

She would take the corner of the couch that faced the water. She carried a book out there with her. She rarely finished a page. She would say look at those colors, and then she would say this is my favorite place in the world, and she would say it every single year as though she had just discovered it.

People would stop. Balconies would fill. Conversations would quiet.

For a few minutes everybody faced the same direction.

Nina had watched it.

Juneille had watched it.

Christy still watches it.

Nina died in 2003. Ms Juneille passed a few years back….both in August when that sun burns into the water…..

Time kept moving. Children grew. Parents aged. Friends left us. The boy in the lagoon pool became the father watching his own children swim there, and then those children grew up too.

And our family kept moving west.

Georgia.

Florida.

Texas.

I had not noticed the direction until recently.

The sunsets changed with the landscape. In southwest Georgia the light fell through pines and live oaks. In Athens it settled beyond Sanford and the hills around town. At Panama City Beach nothing stopped it. The sky opened over the Gulf and the sun went into water.

Now in Texas we watch it fall behind the Hill Country.

Different horizon.

Same woman beside me.

She still takes the chair that faces west. She still brings a book she is not going to read.

A sunset makes you stand there and watch something beautiful leave. No photograph catches it. No amount of wanting buys another five minutes.

A pier is a curious thing. It lets you walk away from shore, out over the water, toward the horizon. For a little while it almost feels as though you could keep going.

But the boards end.

The Gulf keeps going. The horizon keeps going. The light keeps going.

We walk as far as we can with the people we love. Then we reach the end of what we can see.

And we are asked to trust the rest.

When I picture that horizon, Nina is there with a book open on her knee. Juneille is up in Tower II. AK and Stephen are running around the same pools I ran around. And Christy is in the chair that faces the water.

Maybe one day our children will remember us that way.

Not young. Not old. Not as we looked in any particular year.

Just standing somewhere we loved while the light changed around us.

And gone is not the right word.

The sun is still burning.

We simply cannot see it from where we are standing.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Additional pictures taken recently on an iphone in our backyard of Texas in the hill country.

Everywhere I live there seems to be a river that runs through it. Real picture above and the crests and water marks to follow are my way of tying these together. Becoming is not easy……

Sooner or later, someone asks the question.

I got it at a folding table in a fellowship hall, paper plate in one hand, a man named Dale in the other chair who had already finished his pie and started on his wife’s.

“So what do you do?”

Most of us answer with a title.

“I’m a teacher.”

“I’m a nurse.”

“I’m retired.”

If we’re feeling especially honest, we answer with our circumstances instead.

“I’m divorced.”

“I’m a cancer survivor.”

“I’m just trying to make it.”

None of those answers are wrong.

They’re simply not the whole story.

I’ve started to wonder if we’ve been answering the wrong question.

Maybe we are not the titles we’ve collected.

Maybe we are not the mistakes we’ve survived.

Maybe we are not even the feelings that came to visit us this morning.

Somewhere along the way, life has a way of making us forget who we are.

Beneath all the noise, something keeps whispering the same three words.

Keep coming home.

My life has never moved in a straight line.

Some seasons I feel close to God.

Some seasons I drift farther than I care to admit.

Some days I wander.

Some days I remember.

Grace finds me either way.

Faith is not a ladder.

It is more like the Flint River in August.

The water falls.

The shoals appear.

A man can stand in the middle of the channel in his boots and swear the river is gone.

It is not gone.

It has simply slipped beneath the limestone.

It is running beneath the field, and it will rise again in a blue spring three counties south, cold and clear as the day it disappeared.

The river does not stop being a river because you cannot see it.

Neither do you.

We drift.

We return.

We drift again.

Beneath every current is another current, carrying us toward the One who called us long before we knew His name.

Dale is still waiting on an answer.

I hope the next time I have a simpler one.

I am a soul,

learning my way home.

If God allows,

I will leave a lantern burning

where the trail bends.

Someone I never meet

may find enough light

to keep walking.

Boutwell Jones

The Gospel According to the Basin

All photos taken via mobile phone with no touch up or filters


Some people spend their lives climbing mountains.
Some spend their lives carrying them.
My mother never had much time to admire the view.

By the time most girls were worrying about school dances, she was learning the language of cattle. Feed sacks. Sale barns. Dust that settled into your boots before daylight. The work did not care how old you were. The cows did not know the difference between a grown woman and a teenage girl.

Life arrived early.
She married before childhood let go of her hand.
At seventeen, she was holding mine instead.
Life never stopped asking more of her than seemed fair.
Broken marriages.
Hard work that took more than it ever gave back.
Long drives down Georgia highways.
Wrecks that could have ended differently.
Bills that refused to wait.
Funerals where another chair sat empty.

I have watched her leave before sunrise, boots already dusty before most folks had poured their first cup of coffee. The cattle did not care if your heart was breaking.
Neither did the bills.

Morning found her standing.
There were seasons when I thought I understood her.
Now I know I was only watching from the outside.
Children often mistake survival for distance.
Years later, you discover there is a difference.
Some people grow quiet because they stop caring.
Others grow quiet because life has handed them more than words can carry.

Morning found her standing.
The hardest day may have been the day her twin brother died.
Twins share something the rest of us can only imagine.
They do not simply lose a brother or sister.
They lose the only person who remembers the beginning exactly as they do.

Some grief does not disappear.
It simply learns to whisper.

Morning found her standing.
The older I become, the less impressed I am by people who appear strong.
I am far more moved by people who quietly refuse to quit.

That is my mother.
Not because life spared her.
Because it did not.
Back in the Basin, the old live oaks tell the truth.
The strongest limbs are usually the ones the storms nearly claimed.
You can still see where the lightning struck.
You can still trace the scars beneath the bark.
Yet every spring, new leaves.

Not because the tree forgot the storm.
Because life kept flowing through the roots.
That has always reminded me of KFran.
Not untouched.
Not unscarred.
Still growing.

If I could stand beside that sixteen-year-old bride.
If I could look into the eyes of that seventeen-year-old mother holding a little towheaded boy she could not possibly imagine growing into a man.
I would tell her this.

Keep going.
The road ahead will ask everything you have.
There will be days when your heart is heavier than your hands.
There will be losses no one can explain.
There will be mornings when getting out of bed is the bravest thing you do.
But one day that little boy will finally understand.
He was not watching a woman who had all the answers.
He was watching a woman who kept getting back up.

Perhaps that is the greatest inheritance a parent can leave.
Because faith is not always loud.
Sometimes faith puts its boots back on before daylight.

Mom.

The road has been long.
Longer than most people know.
You have carried burdens few ever saw.
You have survived things many never would.
The storms left their names across your life.
They never took your ability to stand.

When I think of you now, I do not first remember the pain.
I remember the sunrise.
Because somehow, after every heartbreak, after every funeral, after every wreck, after every disappointment, morning always found you standing.
And after all these years, I still believe in you.
Even more importantly, I believe the God who carried you this far is not finished with your story.
Not even close.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Three men sat in a Denny’s this morning.

No stage. No speeches. No banquet hall with polished silver and rehearsed applause.

Just breakfast.

Some of the largest moments in a life happen where the coffee is too hot to drink and the waitress calls everyone “hon”.

One of the three had spent more than thirty-five years serving people.
Albert Soto.

Steady. Dependable. The kind of man who becomes part of the foundation without ever asking to be noticed.

The insurance business measures policies.

God measures people.

Not by promotions. Not by titles. Not even by years.
By faithfulness.

Albert loves Houston. He loves the Astros and the Rockets. He loved the Oilers before they left and the Texans after they came. He loves his Longhorns and a California sunset.

He has watched a city lose a team and gain another. He knows what time does to a place.
This morning he wanted to talk about something else.

Time.

He told Chris and me that every one of us is living off an account we cannot see.

No app shows the balance. No statement arrives in the mail. No advisor can estimate what remains.
So spend it carefully, he said.

Invest first in your wife. Then your children. Love them before the calendar fills.

Choose your friends with care. There are only so many chairs around a table. There are only so many evenings left to fill them.

Do not mistake a full schedule for a full life.

The older I get, the more I believe wisdom sounds less like advice and more like a quiet reminder.

Family. Friends. Time given on purpose.

The things we claim matter most are the first things we surrender to meetings, deadlines, and one more email.

Albert spent a career taking care of members.
This morning he reminded two friends to take care of the people waiting at home.

Solomon wrote that two are better than one, because if either falls, the other can lift him up. Careers end. Friendship, tended well, is one of the quiet ways God carries a man home.

Thank you, Soto Express.

Your smile settled rooms. Your professionalism raised the standard. Your friendship made ordinary mornings better.

Somewhere between the Denver omelets and the third refill, you reminded us that the account that matters is not the one we have been saving.

It is the one we have been spending since the day we were born.

Thank you, Albert. You did not only leave a career behind. You left a way to live.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Some trees grow where the ground is clean and easy.

The cypress does not.

It takes root in black water, floodwater, snake water, water that hides what lives beneath it. It stands where the soil cannot decide whether it is earth or river. Most trees would rot there. Most roots would suffocate.

The cypress stays.

I have seen them standing in the backwaters of the Flint, dark and patient, older than every county line drawn around them.

It does not curse the swamp for being a swamp. It does not wait for better ground. It learns how to breathe in the place where it was planted.

Its strange knees rise out of the water like old prayers, worn smooth by weather and time. Scientists still debate what those knees are for. Maybe they help the roots breathe. Maybe they steady the tree against the floods. Maybe the cypress has simply kept one of its secrets, which is probably wise. We have a habit of naming a thing and then assuming we understand it.

Billy Strings sings about sitting under the cypress tree, and the line carries the weight of a man who has finally grown tired of running from himself.

There are places where you go to be entertained.

There are places where you go to be seen.

And then there are places where you go because your soul has grown too heavy to carry standing up.

The cypress is that kind of place.

Sit down.

Let the water move without you.

Let the wind pass through the limbs.

Let the world go on performing somewhere else.

There is a life that can only be found after a person stops trying to make an impression.

Scripture is full of people who took that quieter road.

Joseph, the husband of Mary, never speaks a recorded word in the Gospels.

Not one.

He does not preach. He does not gather followers. He does not explain himself to the neighbors. He receives impossible news, bears public suspicion, protects a woman whose story could have ruined his own, wakes in the night, and carries the child Jesus into Egypt.

Joseph leaves the story almost as quietly as he entered it.

But the Savior of the world slept safely beneath his roof.

That is no small life.

That is a cypress life.

Ruth did not begin with a calling anyone would envy. She began with grief. Her husband was dead. Her future was uncertain. Her homeland was behind her. She followed Naomi into poverty and went into the fields to gather what other people had dropped.

She bent her back for leftover grain.

No platform.

No title.

No applause.

Just love made visible through work.

And somewhere in that dusty field, while Ruth was doing what had to be done, God was weaving her into the bloodline of David and into the earthly lineage of Christ.

She thought she was gathering barley.

God was gathering history.

Andrew lived in the shadow of a louder brother.

Peter spoke first, acted first, failed publicly, and became one of the most recognized men in the Bible. Andrew rarely stood at the center. He simply brought people closer.

He brought Peter to Jesus.

He noticed the boy with the loaves and fish.

He saw what others overlooked and quietly placed it in Christ’s hands.

Andrew did not feed the multitude.

He brought Jesus what was available.

Perhaps that is most of ministry.

Not performing the miracle.

Just carrying the small offering to the One who can.

Barnabas was called the Son of Encouragement, which sounds gentle until you consider the courage it required.

When everyone feared Paul, Barnabas stood beside him.

When another man failed, Barnabas refused to let failure have the last word.

He spent much of his life seeing something in people before they could see it in themselves.

The world remembers Paul’s letters.

But before Paul became the man who wrote them, Barnabas was the man willing to sit beside him.

Some people are remembered for the doors they walk through.

Others are remembered in heaven for the doors they held open.

Moses stood before Pharaoh, but his deepest work happened away from the crowds. He argued with God. He pleaded for people who disappointed him. He fell on his face in prayer for those who blamed him for their own fear.

He led people who questioned him, resisted him, exhausted him, and sometimes wished aloud that they had never followed him.

Still, he interceded.

That may be the hardest form of leadership.

To pray for people who misunderstand you.

To protect people who resent you.

To keep carrying what God gave you when no one seems grateful for the weight on your shoulders.

Quiet service is not weakness.

It is strength that has stopped needing witnesses.

The bald cypress knows something about this.

It can live for centuries. It survives hurricanes, floods, droughts, insects, and time. Its heartwood resists decay because of what has formed within it over the long years.

That is where endurance comes from.

Not from looking unbreakable.

From letting something strong and unseen be formed inside you.

The cypress sheds its needles, too.

Every autumn it goes bare. It stands naked against the winter sky, looking almost dead.

But it is not dead.

It is releasing what it cannot carry into the next season.

There is wisdom in that.

Some of us keep dragging old leaves through every chapter of our lives.

Old wounds.

Old arguments.

Old shame.

Old versions of ourselves that God has already asked us to surrender.

We call it memory.

Sometimes it is fear.

The cypress lets go.

Then it waits.

It does not panic in the bareness.

It trusts what is happening beneath the bark.

Perhaps faith is not always believing that nothing will be lost.

Perhaps faith is believing that even after the loss, God can make us green again.

I think of the unknown legends scattered across this wounded and beautiful planet.

The banana bread lady on Kauai, waking before the tourists stir, mixing flour and fruit, handing something warm through a window to people she will never meet again.

The grandmother who prays over every name in the family and tells no one.

The nurse who adjusts a blanket at three in the morning.

The custodian who knows which child needs an extra word of kindness.

The father who keeps loving a son who no longer listens.

The mother who carries grief so quietly that people mistake her composure for ease.

The recovering addict who chooses sobriety again today, though no one hands out trophies for ordinary Tuesdays.

The spouse who stays gentle in a house where tenderness has become hard.

The neighbor who brings food without asking what happened.

The person who never became famous, wealthy, or widely known, but who made life more bearable for everyone placed within reach.

These are the cypress people.

They grow in hard places.

They give shade without keeping score.

They stand in water that would drown someone with shallower roots.

They become shelter for lives they may never fully see.

The world may never learn their names.

But God does.

That is enough, though it does not always feel like enough.

There are nights when faithful people wonder whether any of it mattered.

Whether the prayers mattered.

Whether staying mattered.

Whether forgiving mattered.

Whether raising the child, caring for the parent, encouraging the friend, or feeding the stranger made any difference at all.

The cypress offers no speech.

It simply stands there.

Year after year.

Flood after flood.

Season after season.

And beneath its branches, life gathers.

Birds nest.

Fish hide.

Children rest.

Travelers stop.

The river slows around its roots.

Maybe the truest measure of a life is not how many people knew our name.

Maybe it is how much life was able to gather near us.

Maybe greatness is not becoming the tallest thing in the forest.

Maybe greatness is becoming a safe place in the swamp.

So sit under the cypress tree.

Sit long enough for your breathing to slow.

Sit until you remember that you are not required to impress God.

Sit until you can hear the quiet machinery of grace working beneath your disappointments.

Sit until you understand that hidden does not mean forgotten.

Sit until you believe that service is not a smaller calling.

It is the road Christ Himself chose.

He washed feet.

He touched the unclean.

He noticed the ignored.

He fed the hungry.

He welcomed the children.

He carried a cross while the crowd watched and misunderstood.

The kingdom came quietly before it came in power.

A child in a manger.

A carpenter in Nazareth.

A seed beneath the ground.

A Savior kneeling with a towel.

So take the quiet road.

Bring the bread.

Hold the door.

Make the call.

Pray the prayer.

Protect the vulnerable.

Encourage the forgotten.

Stay when love asks you to stay.

Leave when obedience asks you to leave.

Let go when the season turns.

And when you find yourself standing in dark water, roots buried in a life you never would have chosen, do not assume God has abandoned you.

Some of His strongest trees grow there.

Some of His deepest work happens there.

And some of the people heaven will call great pass through this world almost entirely unnoticed, leaving behind no monument except the lives that found shelter beneath them.

Sitting under the cypress tree, you may finally understand:

You were never asked to be loud.

You were asked to be faithful.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

Photography is from Jenna, Kelly’s daughter and a grandchild of Mister Bill and Miss Nancy “Annie” Grant

Some men never preach long sermons.

They simply leave a wake.

A son learns more from the back of his father’s shoulders than he does from a thousand speeches. He watches how the old man steers into rough water. He watches how he treats strangers at the dock. He watches how he keeps his word when no one is counting.

This photograph never asks us to look at their faces.

It asks us to look where they are looking.

Both men face the bow.

The water behind them is already becoming memory.

Mr. Bill Grant belonged to a generation that rarely announced its virtues. California raised him. The Army tested him. Christ anchored him. Alongside Miss Nancy, he built something the world has nearly forgotten how to measure.

Not wealth.

Not influence.

A family.

Three children who became the sort of adults every parent quietly hopes for. Grandchildren scattered across the country now, carrying pieces of the same compass into places Mr. Bill and Miss Nancy may never fully see.

That is how legacy works.

An oak never enjoys the shade it creates.

I had met the Grants before that summer.

The summer of 1987 is when I truly met them.

The table was always full.

Food.

Love.

Presence.

Miss Nancy cooked. Every one of us had a part. Someone set the table. Someone carried the dishes out. Someone made the sweet tea.

They gave me a job the same as anyone else.

A boy who is trusted with small things eventually learns he can be trusted with larger ones. Sometimes belonging begins with carrying a stack of plates.

Mr. Bill oversaw the peanut plant. The machinery never seemed to care what time it was. But somehow he still came home, washed the day off his hands, and sat at the table anyway.

That was the sermon.

It never once got spoken out loud.

They never officially adopted me.

They simply behaved as though I already belonged.

There is a difference.

One requires paperwork.

The other requires love.

Nearly forty years later, the miles between Georgia and Pennsylvania and Oregon and Utah and Idaho and Wyoming and Montana and Texas seem much smaller than they should. Grace has a strange habit of ignoring geography.

Looking at this picture, I think of Elijah handing his mantle to Elisha. Not because Mr. Bill is leaving, but because every faithful father spends his life handing away what matters most.

Character.

Conviction.

Quiet courage.

A steady hand on the wheel.

The wake disappears in moments.

The direction does not.

Perhaps that is the real inheritance.

Not the boat.

Not the lake.

Not even the memories.

Just knowing which way to point the bow.

And one day, without realizing it, becoming the shoulders someone else learns from.

“The righteous who walks in his integrity, blessed are his children after him.”
Proverbs 20:7

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

My friend Quinn “Q Hawk, Q, or Q Dawg” took this photo in Oregon. Quinn is featured in the Red Clay Gospels and wrote the forward to volume one. Good ole Gus is Quinn’s right hand companion.

Once, this conifer reached for everything.

Sun. Sky. Rain. Wind.

It learned to live where winters were long, mountains were unforgiving, and the soil offered little comfort. It bent beneath snow, endured drought, survived lightning, and welcomed another spring without asking for applause.

Trees like this are born for places most living things avoid.

Perhaps people are, too.

Then one day, it died.

The green faded.

The needles fell.

The songs moved elsewhere.

Only the weathered trunk remained.

To the hurried eye, its story was over.

But the forest knew better.

Death did not make it worthless.

It simply gave it another purpose.

Birds still found a place to rest.

Small creatures still found shelter.

New seedlings found protection beneath its weathered frame.

Its roots still held the mountainside together when the rains came.

Even in death, it continued serving life.

Conifers have always known something we often forget.

Their needles are built to hold moisture when everything around them is dry.

Their evergreen branches refuse to surrender to winter.

Their cones protect tomorrow’s forest until the right season arrives.

Some even require fire before they release what has been hidden inside them all along.

Creation has been preaching resilience from the beginning.

Stand beside an old tree like this long enough, and you begin to understand something about people.

A life is not measured by how long it stays green.

It is measured by how long it keeps giving after the applause has ended.

Some of the finest men and women I’ve ever known are gone now.

Yet they are still holding families together.

Still shaping grandchildren they never met.

Still speaking through lessons they never realized they were teaching.

Still strengthening weary hearts because they chose faithfulness over recognition.

Love has a longer life than flesh.

Faith reaches farther than hands.

Grace leaves roots that time cannot pull from the ground.

The world celebrates those who shine.

Heaven remembers those who endure.

Every scar you carry.

Every disappointment that didn’t destroy you.

Every prayer that seemed unanswered.

Every season when you wondered if anyone noticed.

None of it was wasted.

God has always done His finest work with lives willing to remain rooted.

So if you’re walking through a winter that seems determined to last forever…

Keep standing.

If the wind has stripped away everything that once made you feel alive…

Keep standing.

If the fire has left you wondering what could possibly come next…

Keep standing.

Because the Author of creation has written resurrection into forests, fields, and faithful hearts alike.

Even after death, a faithful life keeps making room for what comes next.

That is a legacy.

That is grace.

That is why old trees never really disappear.

They simply keep standing in places where the living still need them.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com

There comes a season in life when coincidence starts to feel like too small a word.

A stranger says exactly what your tired soul needed to hear. A road closes, forcing a detour that changes everything. An old friend calls on the one day you were wondering if anyone still remembered your name. A verse you have read a hundred times suddenly reads you instead.

Maybe they are accidents.

Or maybe Heaven has a quieter vocabulary than we imagined.

The old rabbis believed there is no such thing as meaningless chance. They taught that not even a leaf falls beyond the Father’s notice. Catholics call it Divine Providence. Calvinists call it God’s sovereign will. They may debate how the clock works, but all three refuse to believe the Clockmaker ever walked away.

Scripture seems to whisper the same mystery.

Joseph looked back over betrayal, slavery, prison, and forgotten years and finally said, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

Not God wasted it.

God meant it.

That is one of the most staggering sentences in the Bible.

It does not make evil good. It declares that evil never gets the final edit.

Providence is not believing that every flat tire, every diagnosis, every heartbreak was pleasant or painless. It is believing that none of them are beyond redemption. God is so relentlessly creative that He can weave even our rebellion, our grief, and other people’s failures into a story that still bends toward grace.

Perhaps that is why Paul could write that all things work together for good for those who love God. He did not say all things are good. Anyone who has buried a parent, watched a marriage collapse, or stood beside a hospital bed knows better than that.

He said God works.

That little verb changes everything.

Maybe the greatest miracle is not that God occasionally interrupts history.

Maybe it is that He quietly inhabits it.

Through conversations we almost skipped.

Through delayed flights.

Through unanswered prayers that later became answered wisdom.

Through ordinary Tuesdays that looked forgettable until years later.

We spend so much of life asking, “Was that a coincidence?”

Maybe the better question is, “Lord, what are You inviting me to notice?”

Faith is not seeing secret messages hidden behind every mailbox and traffic light.

Faith is walking through an ordinary world believing it is saturated with an extraordinary God.

The burning bush was not remarkable because God made a bush.

The bush became remarkable because Moses finally stopped long enough to notice God was already there.

Perhaps Divine Providence is less about God constantly shouting, and more about learning to hear His whisper beneath the ordinary noise of life.

Lift your bushel.

Pay attention.

The next interruption may not be interrupting your plans at all.

It may be Providence introducing Himself once again.

And perhaps, as the old rabbis always suspected, God is simply saying hello.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com