I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from?

Sometimes I have to find Ralph Stanley’s version of “The White Oak On a Hill” and start playing it. Ralph’s unique voice matches the geology of “my old Clinch Mountain home” as his voice wavers somewhat like a mountain stream, curving around the rocks and carving out a path replete with tree roots and salamander holes.

“There’s a white oak on the hill
At my old Clinch Mountain home
That stands straight and true
On that windy spur alone.”

There are times in life we need to “stand straight and true” in spite of wind, in spite of weather, and sometimes we find we stand there all by ourselves. But the point is we stand. And standing is sometimes all we can do.

There’s not many days that being newly planted in the soil of the North Carolina Piedmont my heart doesn’t long to look over and see the jagged line of the Clinch Mountain, which I saw every day of my growing up years, and again later as I served my first congregations at the foot of Clinch Mountain further up the range.

It reminds me of the time I used to go by myself to the river bluff in the back pasture of our homeplace. Those walks through the pasture would culminate in some time under the shade of mighty trees, including a weathered old oak which had roots that stuck out a good ways underneath it. You could sit on those roots and contemplate the large area on the tree where lightning had struck it and see how it adjusted and grew around that scar and still sustained life.

“And when the cold wind blows
It’s roots they bend and moan
But when the storm has passed
It straightens up and goes on.”

In my boyhood days sitting on that old oak I decided to name it “Abraham.” I would talk to it. I’m not sure what I said, but I don’t think my words hurt it any. I knew that speaking to plants was supposed to help them thrive. I guess I was trying to bring some healing.

It was years later that I learned there was a special place in the Bible near the town of Hebron where Abraham the patriarch of Israel sat under mighty oaks, called the “oaks of Mamre.” And there was where the angels came, three of them, and announced that Abraham would be the father of Isaac. Remember he was an old man and though he had longed for a child, none was forthcoming. Until that day, under those oaks, in that place. Abraham, who was “reckoned” as righteous due to his faith in God, finally received a blessing, and he already knew he was “blessed to be a blessing.” Abraham’s faith became the means for others to know the grace and goodness of God. Planted in the deep soil of God, Abraham stood as solid as a mighty oak, and people could find comfort in the shade of his testimony.

“Lord, let me be like that white oak on the hill
And help me to live in your almighty will
Help me on my journey, Lord
To travel on my own
And give me the strength
To straighten up and go on.”

There was this oak tree at the corner of my home church lot. It stood in front of the old church that had been built in 1899, and it survived the fire of 1963 that destroyed that church building. The third church building was built and opened up in 1967 and that oak was now to the side of the building as they erected it facing east. And on a stormy August evening in 1984 the wind blew that old oak down. It was found to have rotted on the inside, as many such trees will do. The outer layers couldn’t hold the weight of the tree anymore. And it toppled over.

It was such a tragic thing to see that tree down after it had stood so proudly for so long beside this church in all its many forms. As they were cleaning up the wood from this tree, I was able to get a piece of it from which I made a cross and hung it up inside the church for a reminder of that tree’s testimony beside our church. I wondered how many sermons that tree had heard, and how many lives were changed in its shade.

“You know the troubles of this life
The sometimes get me down
And when I look for my friends
They’re not always around
And the good Lord seems to say
‘Son, get up and do my will
And always remember that old
White oak on the hill.’”

After disaffiliation from the United Methodist Church my wife and I decided we needed to be somewhere else. During that awful time of uncertainty and bitterness, I had tried to stay faithful, and lead as I was given opportunity. I told her “I’m just going to get a King James Bible and go back up the holler as far as I can and I ain’t ever coming back out.” She just shook her head.

We had been hoping to one day be able to move near our son and his family so we could be proper grandparents and give them the attention they needed. So we bought a house that was on the boundary of the “Forest Oaks” subdivision, just outside of Greensboro, NC. I didn’t know how we’d get to live in it but slowly and surely God opened up doors. While my family had lived in the mountains since at least 1807, we moved here in 2024 and I became pastor for a little Methodist congregation that also had disaffiliated and needed a preacher.

I thought I was just retreating to a holler, but I see now that God was planting me in a forest of oaks, just so I could tend a Pleasant Garden.

That Ralph Stanley song really captures for me the experience of going through disaffiliation. I had been a very enthusiastic member of Holston Conference, a fifth generation Methodist in my home church, and drawn to serve in areas no one else wanted to go. God blessed me in my time there. But I think God planted me here. And remembering the White Oak on the Hill I know God is moving among us, and the work here isn’t about conference committees and institutional loyalty. It’s about being a strong man of faith, like Abraham, and standing tall in the storms of life, making shade for others to be drawn to the goodness of God. Bending and moaning, but straightening up and going on is the business of the kingdom.