Plan A, No Plan B

“I have been young, and now I am old…”

Psalms 37:25 KJV

These words ring true, for I was once young with all the vigor and passion of youth, my mind and eyes full of hope for the future ahead. And now I am old with the reflection and, hopefully, the wisdom that comes with age.

When you’re young, your desire is to be in love, a magical energy consuming every cell into exuberance! Most of us fall in and out of “love” many times in our youth. It is a joyful time, although, mostly but momentary infatuations of the flesh. Wonderfully, it is also a most necessary adolescent step towards understanding true and lasting love.

Although I had dated a few young ladies – all of them wonderful with special qualities that any young man would find attractive – none of them was “the one.” That special designation was reserved providentially for the young lady that would become my wife. Although we lived on the same side of town, went to the same places teenagers loitered, and had many common friends, our paths seemed to never cross. In retrospect, surely, I’d passed by her home at least a hundred times or more, but I never noticed her. Life is like that. God is like that, only revealing the exact moment of the future He has planned for His children when everything is in its place.

For nearly nineteen years, I was unaware of her existence, but then everything changed.

There she was, as if the angels had placed her before me in a flash of light. An epiphanal beauty appearing before my eyes. For the very first time, my heart awakened in rapturous love. Most people find love at first sight hard to believe, but when it does appear, it is fantastical! Truly, our meeting was by divine appointment, a providential intrusion into both our lives’ trajectories. And because of this intrusion, my heart, mind, and soul were translated. I was instantly teleported into a future in which this beautiful angelic being was the axis, humanly speaking, of everything going forward. I would like to say the immediate experience for her part was mutual, however, that would be more than a stretch of the facts.

Through all that marriage gifted us: children, grandchildren, health and sickness, poverty and wealth, our love has endured. Sometimes, we’ve been fire-hot in passionate romance, and other times fire-hot in anger at each other. I will admit that most of those later times were brought on by my youthful impetuous nature. Through it all, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, we have been by each other’s side, now for over forty years. And the most important thing we have learned over those four decades is that giving up is not an option. Our family, our little tribe is Plan A, and there is no Plan B.

God’s world is beautiful – all of it – and, from time to time, those beauties may entice us away, but they are just distractions from our true love.

Brothers and Sisters, recall that first time you fell in love with Dixie, that transcendent moment when you realized how special, beautiful, and timeless your home was. Remember back to the first time you understood how deep your roots were in her soil. Recall the fragrance of the air after a summer thunderstorm, playing in leaves or pine straw in the fall, the crisp air and a light snow of early winter, and most, especially, envision every flower blooming from her soil and the playfulness of everything fresh and young each spring.

Our love for our land and our people is a marriage; there are times of bliss and times of sorrow, but this is our home, and it is Plan A. There is no Plan B. We will persevere.

The last part of this psalm gives us great hope in these troublesome times: “…yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.“

Deo Vindice!

God save the South!