Where are you from...

Where are you from?

I am from a place where everyone really does know your name and they are, in fact, almost always glad you came by to drink coffee and share some news.

From a place where you live long in the shadows of cotton pickers and beloved grandparents.  Where people trust people and know their banker by name.  It's a place that never seems to wake up despite the advance of technology and time.  

I'm from a place where country music and Gospel are the soundtracks of our days and King James Bibles are the script we just keep reading and living year after year.  

From a place where going out for fast food is a treat and where vacations are planned years in advance.  A place with a community library, a rural route and a full service gas station.

 I'm from a place where a revival is still news in town and when a new restaurant opens we all take guesses on how long it will stay.  

This is a place where everyone once was a Democrat and now just about everyone is a Republican and yet no one seems to have changed one thing they believe.  

It's a dinner of leftovers with your folks after a day of working in the yard or in the field or at the factory and it's knowing that some good people go to church and some good people don't.  It's believing in things like hard work, tough love and redemption.  

People still get baptized here and people still drift away.  

It's a place that most people want to leave when they are young and few actually do.  Most of those come back even if just to die.

From a town where everyone knows the undertaker personally and where people are still new even if they have lived here 30 years.  

Some people might say it's a backward place and in a lot of ways they would be right.  

Yet there is something special about knowing people truly and loving a place deeply and realizing that nowhere else would quite be home.