Grace’s Address

Two Oaks

Photo of Katherine Francis Boutwell in truck with a young Shane “Boutwell” Jones hanging out in the cab! The oak limbs behind the truck were from one of the two massive live oaks near the cinder block.

If grace keeps an address in my memory, it is there.

The little cinder block house where I grew up was never much to look at.
If you drove past it, you might remember the chicken houses. The fields. The red clay road. The dust hanging behind an old pickup long after the truck had disappeared.

But you would remember the trees.

Two live oaks stood watch over that patch of Southwest Georgia long before I was born. Their roots reached deeper into the Basin than any story my family ever told about itself. Their limbs stretched so wide they shaded half of my childhood, and so low that a little blond boy could climb them without asking permission.

Everything that mattered seemed to happen beneath those trees.
My grandfather, O’Neal Boutwell, gathered us there.
I watched him clean two hogs that would become Brunswick stew, chopped pork, and ribs. The smoke stayed in our clothes for days. The meal tasted better because every hand in the family had helped make it.

I did not have the words for it then.
But I was learning that feeding people always costs somebody something.

Swings hung from the old limbs. A porch swing where old men quietly solved the troubles of the world until supper called them inside. Trucks found shade after long days in the field. Cousins ran until their legs gave out. Babies passed from one set of arms to another. Stories were told for the hundredth time as though no one had ever heard them before.

Back then I thought those oaks were simply giving us shade.
Now I believe they were giving us something far greater.

They were teaching us how to stay.
Years later, the road nearly took me.
One of the worst wrecks of my life happened right there, within sight of those same trees. Our car left the road and came to rest against the great cornerstone rock beneath their branches.
When everything finally became still, I climbed out.
No broken bones.
No blood.
Not even a bruise.

Some will call it luck. Some will call it providence. I have lived long enough to stop demanding that God explain every mercy He gives.
I only know the sun came up again the next morning…
…and I was still here to see it.

Those two old oaks have watched every version of the man I have been.
They watched the barefoot boy who believed the world had no end.
They watched the young man who thought he could carry more than he was built to bear.
They watched seasons of pride.
Seasons of fear.
Seasons of striving.
They watched the man everyone thought they knew.
They watched the man only God truly did.

Maybe that is the calling of old trees.
They never applaud our masks.
They simply stand through enough storms to remind us that leaves come and go, success comes and goes, even a good name comes and goes.

But roots tell the truth.
The older I get, the less I care about looking strong.
I would rather be deeply rooted.
Faith is not measured by how tall a man stands while the sun is shining.
It is revealed by what still holds him when the wind finally comes.
And the wind always comes.
Those two live oaks are probably still standing.

If they could speak, I do not think they would tell you about the accomplishments of the people who gathered beneath them.
I think they would tell you about grace.
About family.
About second chances a man never earned.
About meals shared by grateful, ordinary people.
About children laughing before they knew what sorrow was.
About an old grandfather in a weathered Stetson who taught a little boy that love usually looks like hard work done where no one is clapping.

And I think they would tell you about a Savior who spent the whole length of my life doing exactly what those trees had been doing all along.

Standing.
Waiting.
Holding out shade for weary souls.
Sending roots of grace deeper than my eyes could ever follow.
If grace keeps an address in my memory…
it is there.

Beneath two old live oaks in the red clay of the Basin.
Where the Carpenter had already been waiting in the shade long before I knew His name.

Boutwell Jones

redclaygospel.com