Faith Works 1-24-25

Faith Works 1-24-25
Jeff Gill

Evidence of absence or absence of evidence
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In my shuttling back and forth between Ohio and Indiana these last few years, there's a spot alongside I-70 that keeps me wondering.

It's right around the 78 mile marker, if you know the road as well as I do, north of London, Ohio and west of the Little Darby Creek but looking west across the Deer Creek drainage.

There are some twenty oaks and catalpas in a grove, set around plot with a barn towards the back of it, to the east of the road and cluster of tall trees.

Clearly there was a farm house, a pretty substantial one at that, in the middle of those tall trees. It had to still be standing there in Madison County in 1960, maybe even 1970, since the interstate gently bends around that parcel adjoining the right of way. Not much, but enough to suggest the original designers avoided the extra cost of purchasing and demolishing a private home by going just south of it.

Yet the land shows no marks today, other than the outline of the trees and the presence of the outbuilding which would have been well behind the home. It's been gone a while. Perhaps some local historical society or old maps could tell me more, but I haven't gone that far yet. Once I did take an exit, and drove around by way of a small town that would have been a few miles south of the farm house I imagine, up to the gate, and I walked back just for a quick loop around under the trees, which were even taller than I'd imagined in my mile-a-minute passage past them.

Why do I keep idly wondering about this distant, somewhat isolated spot? Other than passing it often enough to keep the curiosity fresh? Matters of loss and absence have obviously been on my mind in recent years; there's also an echo of a book and film which color in some imagined details here, "A Thousand Acres," by Jane Smiley. If you know the work, my mullings may well make more sense to you than for others. It's a story that's not my own, to be sure, but issues of how memory loss and dementia can mark and bend a family are front and center in this modern retelling of "King Lear" set in Iowa or Illinois (the latter where the movie was filmed, on land I know somewhat).

In that story, a spoiler alert, but at the end there is a grand old farmhouse that is ultimately torn down, and the land merged into a corporate mega farm. Only a few old tall trees remain to mark a home for generations of farmers.

So I wonder about the generations who lived there by what would become an interstate highway. Possibly a widow found she no longer wanted to live in a house with traffic day and night a few hundred yards away, and the children had no interest in farming. That's a simple story, but reality has a way of being much more complex. There is a story there, and I don't know it, I just sense the presence of a complex story as I pass that clump of trees.

Homes are torn down, churches close, businesses end their run, and the locations change in function and purpose, each with different marks left behind which few can read clearly. Hebrews 13:8 says "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever" with a promise that goodness endures, while evil passes away and is dissolved. It's a promise we need to hear, and hold onto. Bad news seems to leave all the permanent marks, while love and goodness appear to wash away all too quickly.

I John 5 says there is a record in heaven, a truth that endures. May it be so.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking about what endures. Tell him your lasting memories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.