Nothing really changes
Everything remains the same
We are what we are till the day that we die
(Unless we love the Lord)
Nothing really changes
Everything remains the same
We are what we are till the day that we die
~Nothing Really Changes by Larry Norman
© Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Larry Norman was unique as a Christian songwriter in the late 60s and 70s. His lyrics were deeper than most, and sometimes they just seemed pretty weird. Sometimes it wasn’t a song at all, but a standalone poem. With a British accent. Something to make you think, challenge the status quo, make people squirm a little. Eric won poetry contests on the Jefferson High School Varsity Speech Team using a poem by Larry Norman.
In the above humorous song, Larry says nothing really changes, everything remains the same. But I would point out that actually nothing really remains the same. You can never go back to where you were before and find everything unchanged. Every time we go into Lafayette, we notice another building that has just been built, another business that has just opened. Whenever we pass Delphi on the Hoosier Heartland Highway, we see more progress on the memorial baseball park for school girls Abby & Libby, the two young best friends who were tragically murdered while taking a walk on the Delphi High Bridge Trail a few years ago.
In fact, the Hoosier Heartland Highway wasn’t always there. We remember well when State Rd. 25 North wound through the middle of Burrows, with a speed trap in the middle of town, and how David, as a young lad with one of those plastic kiddie cars, drove that car in the middle of the right lane like all the other drivers, until a friendly stranger stopped him and sent him home. We remember when the Heartland was under construction, when we went out to the newly smoothed but unpaved area with our kites and flew them, unhindered by cars, trees, or mole holes. (We can’t do that now.)
We remember when we emailed using “dial-up,” and the provider was Carroll-net, a non-profit organization operated through the Delphi Library. Dial-up was a way to use your landline phone to connect to the internet and email, but if somebody was connected too long, you could never call them.
In fact, we remember back when there wasn’t an internet, when the only computer we had was a Commodore 64, basically a game computer. But we had a database for our bookselling business on it, and we could do a search for that book that was as fast as one book every second! So by the time we finished our meal, the search was done! It was amazing technology!
And we remember when out here in Carroll County, there was no such thing as a cell phone of any kind or internet, or even email. We could call Delphi, Rockfield, Deer Creek, or another home in Burrows, but that was about it. Everywhere else was long distance, including Flora where we had our 4-H fair, and all our friends in Lafayette. Nobody ever called us for fear of running up their phone bill. We were isolated, and although we liked our house and our new surroundings, we missed our friends – a lot.
But we had a good thing going out here in Burrows. We had our own general store with gas pumps, a church, a little car lot, a cafe, a post office, and a community building. Our kids made a travel brochure of Burrows for a school project, using Paintbrush, an early version of Paint. It was a hit, and the travel brochure is now pinned to the wall of the “new” fire station that was built with a government grant. It took its place among the other historical items there, including class pictures of students at the old Burrows School, articles about things like fires, and a list of Liberty Township residents who were members of the military during World War II.
The old community building was home to a 4-H club we had for a while, with the leader being yours truly. We used it for meetings and dinners, and used the stage for talent shows. It was really tiny, but Lisa and Emily learned to use tiny ballet steps so they wouldn’t twirl right off the stage.
The community building is now used for storage, but we’re thankful for the room at the fire station. Chili suppers and other meetings can happen there, when there aren’t pandemics to reckon with.
We remember when the general store was a thriving little business. In the front, the manager and his wife sold sandwiches. In the back, there were shelves with staples like bread and diapers. And off to the other side were tables, where the farmers came into town to play cards and fill the room with smoke.
We learned how Lisa and some of her friends figured out how to let themselves out of the second-floor window of our house, walk to the general store undetected, and get back into the upstairs window with a bucket of candy.
Over time, the owners of the store had to close it down, and because there was some dispute over the title to the building, they never sold it, but abandoned it to the county. The roof caved in and we watched trees grow up inside the walls through the broken windows.
Recently, someone actually bought that poor former building for a song and began to remove the clutter. He even did the physical labor needed to remove the gas tanks under the concrete. More power to him!
There was a really small seedling of a pine tree, maybe only a foot tall if that, given to us by one of Emily’s friends who lived by a lake. This was planted near the barn, and now it towers far above the barn.
And the barn, always yellow, was rather run-down when we bought the place, so much so that our insurance company immediately sent us a letter saying here’s all the stuff you should fix on your property, which included the holes in the barn. Here’s how it used to look:
Now it has newer yellow siding, which was applied by son David and grandson Jay one summer.
Next door to our house, there was a couple, the Harts, who had a dog named Alex who had belonged to their son, in a fenced-in area adjoining our property. Over time, the Harts passed away, the dog was moved elsewhere, and the house was shuttered, a tree has grown up through the front porch that towers over the house, and the entire fenced-in area is filled with trees that not only tower over the house, they reach out towards ours, and some trees grew through the fence. The heirs to the property still never come by, but they would not sell it to us when we thought to turn it into a parking lot for our business. They just pay enough property taxes to keep the building from going to a tax sale.
Various trees we had on the property are no longer there. The plum tree we planted was cut down in 2011, along with our Concord grape arbor, because we needed to expand the kitchen. We had a teenage friend who hugged the tree because she didn’t want to see it cut down, and she was actually somewhat traumatized by the thought. And when the grapevines were removed, that was the end of our annual grape juice canning as a family pastime. No longer would there be 50 or so quarts of grape juice to drink or turn into jelly.
Some pine trees we had near the ditch all turned a sickly yellow and died. That could have been something in the storm sewer, possibly gas leaking from those underground tanks at the general store?
The big mulberry tree in the front yard was cut down for Lisa’s wedding. But it wasn’t done lightly. This was the same tree where we had put a Rock of Remembrance, an Ebenezer stone, so that when people came later and asked, “What meaneth the rock in the mulberry tree?” we could remember the vows we had made unto the Lord at that time. Later, we positioned an old toy tractor by the stump, for decoration.
There used to be a line of poplars, straight and tall, along the road on 900. Those died and a friend came to help us take them down. The logs were just sitting there, and I was really hoping we could use them for a lesson in building a log cabin, but they were a little heavy for that, and we lacked the engineering prowess to figure out a way to get them on top of each other without a crane. We weren’t even really very good at making wattle and daub lean-to’s. But we did manage to come up with some pretty cool pioneer costumes for family pictures.
And then, there was the weeping willow, one of the largest and finest weeping willows I’d ever seen. Once Chris drew a picture of it and handed it to his Grandma Haley, who was going deaf. “Oh, what’s this?” she asked, and Chris explained that it was our weeping willow. “Oh really?” she said. “Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d think it looked almost like an old weeping willow!”
“It is a weeping willow, Grandma.”
“What’s that? It’s probably fireworks or something, but it sure looks like an old weeping willow!”
Well, it’s no longer there, and you can’t use the slender branches as bullwhips anymore. This one really affected Susie because it was gone when she came back from Bible college one year. Once, an evangelist, one Tony Trusty from Winemac, came by handing out his business cards, and told us he removed tree stumps. And so, now you can’t tell where those favorite trees used to be.
When we had inheritance money from my Grandpa, the first thing we planned to do in our remodeling plans was to move the bathroom. When the house had first been built in the 1880’s, it had an outhouse for bathroom breaks (still there!).
But before we bought the house, someone had installed indoor plumbing and carved out a bathroom from some of the kitchen. We kicked the bathroom back out of the kitchen and put a new bathroom between the house and the old summer kitchen, along with another small one and a laundry room. It’s actually time to remodel the bathroom again. Some of it, we just didn’t do right the first time.
Then we painted in the kitchen and had new cabinets installed, which were sorely needed.
We well remembered the time one of the old cabinets simply fell off the wall one day, with the weight of our dishes, and many had been broken. We needed something more sturdy! The installation guy clarified that he would be unable to actually hang the cabinets perfectly straight ‒ because over time, the house had settled, and now none of the walls were straight. Instead, he had to do something that would appear straight.
We made a new office for Eric, which doubled as a shipping and receiving room. The outside of the old summer kitchen was paneled, the electric was upgraded and moved into the dining room where it wouldn’t be drowned in a flood, and we had new metal roofs installed for the house and barn.
We had a wooden deck made over the crumbling cement front porch and built another deck in the back. Some of that has already been altered by time, the elements, and plant life, with deck planks curling up at the ends.
Meanwhile, the big sugar maple in the backyard, where Chris had a treehouse, kept growing. Neighbor kids and grandkids alike loved climbing it. And if beautiful fall leaves were a commodity, we’d be rich!
It provided great maple syrup when there were kids in the house who could be responsible for collecting and boiling down sap, but it grew so big that the branches overshadow the old summer kitchen, where I have my computer and type emails all day. Some critters in the tree just walk down to the end of a branch and hop out onto the roof of my office. And sometimes, windstorms make me a bit nervous.
I told Eric we needed to have a wooden playground set for our grandkids under that big tree, because everybody else who’s a grandparent in Carroll County has a playground set for their grandkids! Up it went, assembled by our Leonard’s Books workers who had kids, because at the time, it was still acceptable for them to come to work with their parents and play in the yard.
Recently, a great big storm took down one of the main trunks of the sugar maple and it came crashing down, bringing other large branches down with it, but they all missed the playground set, just barely. You can’t even tell anything is missing, that tree is so huge.
Seasons came and went, and they’re still coming. Sometimes there’s a mulberry tree along the roadside, and sometimes it starts to peter out and we find another one, young and prolific, in another part of the yard. There are always, always mulberries for pies, even if you have to walk along the old highway that is now called Burrows Road. You can just head out north towards the turnaround that was left when the Hoosier Heartland was made, and the parts of the old highway that connected Burrows with Clymers and Burrows with Rockfield, had been taken out. And mulberry pies are better than raspberry pies because they are sweeter and they don’t have those awful seeds. But … maybe we don’t need pies in our old age.
But Larry Norman didn’t really speak of trees, remodeling kitchens while other buildings are abandoned, or even the way my hair has faded in color and turns orange in Burrows well water. When he was singing about how “nothing really changes,” he was mainly talking about people ‒ not their looks, but human nature. He was saying that humans are similar in each generation:
Would Henry the 8th use etiquette
In a busy New York luncheonette
Would Cleopatra die when when bit
Or save herself with a tourniquet
Would Beethoven join a jazz quartet
Would Ben Hur drive a blue Corvette
Would Aristotle be an acid head
Would Cain kill Abel with a bayonet
But the key phrase in Larry Norman’s song is:
Unless we love the Lord
And at the end of the song:
Unless J.C. sets you free … nothing really changes.
And then, dear friend, when we do love the Lord, EVERYTHING changes:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. 2 Cor. 5:17
Then He who sat on the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." And He said to me, "Write, for these words are true and faithful." Rev. 21:5
Yesterday, my brother Mike got remarried in a joyous ceremony in Texas, and we watched the livestream here in Indiana. Two weeks ago our son Chris was also remarried, to the woman of his dreams. Without getting into too many details, I will just say that there are new seasons full of the hope of happiness and fulfillment ahead, in stark contrast to previous seasons of suffering. Our God is the God who says He makes all things new. And He does!
Everything changes but God. He who makes all things new, including ourselves, is Himself unchanged. And so is His Word:
Jesus Christ, is the same yesterday, today, and forever. ~Hebrews 13:8
Forever, O LORD, Your word is settled in heaven. ~Ps. 119:89
Jesus is our eternal constant, no surprises, no failures, no sudden changes. He is the same as He was when I was born and born again as He is now, and as He will be when I leave Planet Earth. We are His, and there are no backsies!
And to me, that is reassuring!
No comments:
Post a Comment