Last year I wrote an entry here called “Holding up my hand,” in which I compared my faith journey to my mother walking me to school on my first day of kindergarten. It’s my favorite entry here, but because I wrote it shortly after I started this blog, few people have seen it. Since I get more than ten times the traffic now (a whopping 300 visits a week which, I’m sure, has WordPress.com scrambling to expand its server farm), I thought I’d shamelessly try to drive more traffic to that post.
The map below shows how I walked to elementary school as a boy in the 1970s. My family lived in a little neighborhood of small, cheap prefab homes on the southeast side of South Bend, Indiana. As my mom walked me to school on my first day of kindergarten, she pointed out all of the interesting things along the way. My story is about what faith is made of, and how it’s not made of the interesting things along the way. So now when you read “Holding up my hand,” you can refer to the map for easy reference!
In the 34 years since that first trip to school, the properties my old neighborhood have become rentals, most houses with peeling paint and yards full of weeds and brown grass. Young families still live there, though. Children still take the Secret Sidewalk and pass the synagogue on their way to school, but the hippies are certainly gone (as is the woods on that corner) and the Church of Christ is now the Living Stones Church. I hope mothers are still holding their children’s hands on their first day.