The Joy of the Journey

**This was originally published on Thursday, November 13, 2014, in my newspaper column, “The Old Paths,” in The Stokes News. Due to a website change a few years ago, the publishing company broke all links to our old articles which were archived online. This was a tragic mistake and resulted in the loss of thousands of newspaper articles. Little by little, I am putting my old columns on this blog so that they can be preserved. Each column may be updated to reflect present times when transferred to this blog.**

We humans always seem bent on getting somewhere. Rush, rush, hurry, hurry, get to where you’re going—eyes on the prize. Sometimes we focus so much on the goal that we take the journey for granted, not realizing that the joy is in the journey.

Before we know it, these present paths become the old paths. I think that often we are somewhat arrogant about life. We assume that “what is” will always be. Then when we come to our senses later, we mentally kick ourselves for not treasuring those old paths while we walked them.

Because they DO end. Times do change. Progress happens. And that’s okay. It’s the way of life. But the realization of the inevitability of change should make us appreciate the present more.

I remember the day Andy Griffith died. How I astounded myself by sobbing for a spell on that July day! Somehow the thought that I had never lived a day on Earth without Andy figuratively presiding as “Sheriff of Mayberry” hit me hard. A very pleasant era of my life seemed to have ended.

I sort of felt the same way last week when L.D. Sutphin passed away. I don’t remember a time in my life when he didn’t run the Cove Grill. That place has become iconic to Walnut Cove, hence rendering L.D. a sort of icon himself.

Many’s the time over the years I’ve walked into Cove Grill to get a cheeseburger on toast—all the way, of course. And I usually got a side order of L.D., too (whether or not I asked for it!)—his wit, his jokes, his genuineness.

One time he brought out his keyboard and wanted me to play “Amazing Grace.” Mind you, he didn’t ASK me to; he TOLD me to. The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass myself by struggling to remember the chords to that song in front of the other customers. But guess who ended up playing “Amazing Grace” in the Cove Grill? Yours truly. It’s a memory I smile at now.

When my Granny Smith was dying of cancer in the mid-1970s, she still loved to eat that trademark cheeseburger on toast from Cove Grill. My five kids grew up loving that same treat that nobody could make like L.D. (or his many children, grandchildren and relatives who worked there and learned from the best!).

Lately, I had taken to ordering the two-hot-dog special, including crinkle-cut fries and a big ol’ sweet tea. And I generally sent one of my kids into Cove Grill to get it. I’m regretting that now. It robbed me of some of the final times I could’ve enjoyed L.D. picking on me.

Yes, I’ll remember the picking and good-spirited teasing, but you know what will stick with me the most? The way he treated me after my first marriage ended. L.D. had been friends with my ex-husband, too, so I was nervous about seeing ye olde “Cove Grill Meister” after the split. Truth be told, I avoided the Cove Grill for a little while.

But one day the lure of those cheeseburgers won out, and I went back. My fears of judgment were in vain. L.D. greeted me just the same as always. He kindly told me he had heard the news and was sorry, then he went right on back to pleasantly passing the time of day with me while I stood there in the narrow space in front of the counter, waiting on my food.

I’ve heard it said that when you die, people won’t remember what you said and did as much as they’ll remember how you treated them and made them feel. Wisdom indeed.

Now that L.D. is gone, the good way he treated me and the multitudes of customers he served over his 40-year career at the Cove Grill are a part of the old paths. We come to expect what we’ve always known, and when it’s gone, we are somewhat taken aback.

L.D. in his happy place—Cove Grill!

That same universal truth hit me at the recent “Back in the Day” festival in Walnut Cove. When I saw the old tobacco buck with a vintage aluminum can holding the ball of twine, I was transported back to a time I had falsely assumed would never end.

Some of you, like me, remember how you spent your toddlerhood sleeping on a blanket under the barn shelter on early summer mornings while your parents primed “baccer.” You recall running on your little legs to catch a ride on the slide as the tractor came in from the field.

You girls might remember hanging around the barn, just itching to be whatever age they told you you had to be to hand leaves. (For me, it was nine.) Oh, the precision of making sure your tiny hand had three leaves in it, with the stems evened up at the top so that the stringer (a person back in the day—not a machine) could grab it and sling it over the stick.

Since that’s all I’d ever known, I thought that was the way it would always be. But by my teenagehood, the bucks were relegated to a back corner of the packhouse, and the barn area was filled with the mechanical hum of an electric stringer. We slapped armfuls of tobacco onto the conveyor belt—gone the precision of three-leaf handfuls. Stringing skills my mother and others had honed their entire lives were suddenly obsolete.

And then I was a mother myself, and my kids were asking, “What were Papa’s old tobacco sticks used for?”

Well, last Saturday, they got to see firsthand. They learned to hand leaves as my mother taught them right there in Walnut Cove’s Fowler Park. And crowds gathered around to watch, cameras in hand, videocameras rolling—some reliving the memories, others gaping at something they had never witnessed.

As for me? I was hit once more with the universal truth that while we’re in the moment, we tend to think the current way of life is permanent. And when we realize our error, we wish we could go back—even if just for a few minutes.

I’d like to spend just one more Saturday handing leaves to my mama down at Grandpa Bray’s old barn, chatting up a storm to Aunt Sylvia and the other gals. Then I’d like to ride over to the Cove Grill and get me a cheeseburger on toast from L.D. before getting ready for another Saturday night of softball at DeHart Field.

But I walk the paths of the present which will all too soon be old paths themselves, so I’d better enjoy this journey before it’s gone—making precious memories along the way.

****The Cove Grill shut down in 2019 due to coming road construction. It was finally torn down on Tuesday, August 3, 2021, to make way for the planned road. I can’t explain what it did to my old paths heart when I saw the site of one of my favorite eateries now a bulldozed vacant lot. There was a lot of Walnut Cove history in that building. I will confess having shed some sentimental tears over the loss of the Cove Grill.

Cove Grill being torn down on Aug. 3, 2021. (Photo credit: Amanda Brown Sutphin, L.D.’s daughter-in-law)

View from across the railroad tracks where Cove Grill has been a familiar site for many decades. (Photo credit: Tina Martin)

L.D. and the flowers he loved—in front of the Cove Grill! (Photo credit: Amanda Brown Sutphin)

I was overjoyed when I read this sign on the Cove Grill several years ago! I loved their fish sandwiches.

L.D.’s characteristic hat—still with the 919 area code that we haven’t had in many, MANY years! (Photo credit: Tina Martin)

Just looking at the menu there on the wall makes me hungry for some Cove Grill food! L.D.’s prices were very cheap.

I wish I had a two hot dog special that came with those awesome crinkle-cut fries and a sweet tea! You couldn’t beat the taste or the price!

The old Cove Grill “grill” is still in use at L.D.’s son’s house.

The Old Paths: Revival rising

**This was originally published on Thursday, April 28, 2016, in my newspaper column, “The Old Paths,” in The Stokes News. Due to a website change a few years ago, the publishing company broke all links to our old articles which were archived online. This was a tragic mistake and resulted in the loss of thousands of newspaper articles. Little by little, I am putting my old columns on this blog so that they can be preserved. Each column may be updated to reflect present times when transferred to this blog.**

Although it is obvious from my columns that I am a Christian, I try to stay away from too much discussion of religion in my writings for secular publications. I was advised to do so years ago when I was editor of The Stokes News, and I obeyed…..with only the occasional mention of “the Good Book” or “the Man upstairs” (couched in those generic terms to spare me any scolding from the higher-ups). I typically write about family, our Southern dialects, county events, nature.

Yes, I noticed that even big-city secular newspapers often have a regular religious columnist or a “Religion” section. The Washington Post even has a religion reporter. Nonetheless, I kept on writing columns that would not rankle the likes of my former publishers at Heartland Publications, being the good little girl that I am.

But today I am stepping outside the bounds of “good-little-girlism.”

Recently, there was something in the realm of religion going on across this country that is most definitely newsworthy. In fact, it is so newsworthy that secular newspapers were picking up the scoop. For instance, I read an account of these events in The Logan Banner, a newspaper owned by the same company that owns The Stokes News.

The event? Revival breaking out amongst youth in WV and KY schools. No, I’m not getting this confused with the movies “Woodlawn” and “Facing the Giants.” This isn’t a movie I’m talking about; it’s real life.

Teenagers were preaching in the halls of their high schools. Kids were repenting in the school gym during lunch period. Youth were congregating on football fields at night to pray.

Although I’m sure this youth revival was actually birthed through prayer long before the initial sparks flashed, one of the first catalysts for this fiery outbreak was a young man named Skyler Miller, a two-time leukemia survivor who decided to preach in the halls of West Virginia’s Logan High School on March 24, 2016.

The Logan Banner reported: “‘I had been praying for a long time that Jesus would send me into the hall to preach the gospel because I wanted to be fearless and bold for him just like the disciples and apostle Paul,’ Miller said. ‘About 20 minutes before I did it, he told me, ‘Today is the day, Skyler. Go be a light and let the broken know who I am.’”

Rather than mocking him, students began to sit down in the hall to listen to Miller. By the next day, Good Friday, he was preaching in the school gym on his lunch break.

Less than a month later, just a bit south at Mingo Central High School, the school’s prayer club announced that a revival service would be held in the school auditorium. By the next day, word got around that the auditorium would not hold the expected crowd, so the event was moved to the school’s football field.

It’s a really good thing they moved it because the Williamson Daily News reported that nearly 3,000 people showed up. (And folks, this is in a town as small as my hometown of Walnut Cove—population 1,400!) Pictures from the event went viral on the Internet—teenagers with their hands raised, tears pouring, on their knees, being baptized in an inflatable swimming pool in the end zone. I saw pictures of weeping, praying students at several schools in the WV/KY border regions—not just high schools, but also elementary and middle schools.

It was indeed reminiscent of the scene in the 2006 movie “Facing the Giants” where students are in prayer huddles on the football field, as well as the scene in the recent Sean Astin movie “Woodlawn” where students are praying in the school gym. The latter is, in fact, based on the true story of the revival that swept through Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, AL, in the mid-1970’s.

Why am I so interested in this revival phenomenon? Because in 1996, I dreamed of a great revival in the area of Southeastern Middle School in Walnut Cove, NC. It was the first of many dreams of a revival starting in Walnut Cove, a town I hated at the time. I was taken by surprise by these dreams and fought for a while against what I knew to be true—that I would not be able to escape my hometown and needed to stay in order to pray for the coming revival.

In October 2000, I attended a Christian youth conference in Charlotte, NC. I had been studying the great 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles and was desperate to find a rare old book by Frank Bartleman, an eyewitness of that revival. Suddenly, I was approached by an older lady whom I did not know. She handed me that very book and said, “I got this for myself, but God told me to give it to you. You’re going to need it.” Talk about astounded!

I never saw that lady again.

Fast forward through 14 years of praying, hungering, thirsting for this revival in the town that I no longer detested but had fallen head over heels in love with. We arrive at late 2014 with me at a prayer meeting at the church I pastor, The Well. Enter another woman unknown to me. Since she came with a visiting friend from a church in Clemmons, NC, I assumed she was trustworthy.

After a time of prayer, I suddenly felt from God to go to this mystery lady and ask her to pray over me about Walnut Cove. I hesitated but finally yielded. Imagine my shock when she told me she had been waiting for me to come to her, and then laid her hands on my head and began to speak of Azusa Street and a revival coming to Walnut Cove. She spoke of things she could not have known in the natural.

But it is what she said next that hit me even harder: “This revival will be focused on youth.”

I had known that, to a degree, ever since that incredible Charlotte youth conference in 2000. This is why I organize annual youth rallies in Walnut Cove at Lions Park or in London Elementary School Gym. This is why I host youth Bible schools all summer long…..because I believe what swept through these small coal-mining towns of West Virginia and Kentucky is going to sweep through Walnut Cove as well.

Our youth are hungry for something more than traditional religion. They want a current move of God. They’ve searched long enough in drugs, alcohol, promiscuity. They want something real and lasting.

Yes, I’ll go back to writing about springtime and children and the old paths. But I just figured that if the Washington Post, The Logan Banner, the Williamson Daily News and others can touch on religion occasionally, so can I.

I feel revival rising…..

The Old Paths: What about the children?

**This was originally published on Thursday, September 26, 2013, in my newspaper column, “The Old Paths,” in The Stokes News. Due to a website change a few years ago, the publishing company broke all links to our old articles which were archived online. This was a tragic mistake and resulted in the loss of thousands of newspaper articles. Little by little, I am putting my old columns on this blog so that they can be preserved. Each column is updated to reflect present times when transferred to this blog.**

Little did I know in early September 2013 when I penned a newspaper column about time healing our hurts that our county would suffer several horrendous hurts that very week. I had used the example of Sonia Luster—the 16-year-old killed in an automobile accident on her way to North Stokes High School in 2008—noting that she died the day before the Stokes Stomp, our county’s signature festival.

Sonia Luster’s mom, Dee, at the North Stokes High School graduation the year that Sonia would have graduated—wearing a shirt with a picture of Sonia graduating from an earlier grade.

Imagine my horror at the 2013 Stokes Stomp when I heard the tragic news that three other Stokes County youth had just been killed in auto accidents—one the night after I wrote my column, two others the night before the Stomp. My heart felt like lead as I was told the heartbreaking details of the wrecks that affected every high school in the county.

One victim was a West Stokes High School student, another a South Stokes High student, another a recent graduate of Meadowbrook Academy in Stokes County. One driver, who survived but was charged with DWI and two counts of felony death by motor vehicle, had attended North Stokes High.

I had left the county fair in King on Wednesday just an hour or so before the first wreck occurred on nearby Meadowbrook Road. On Friday, I had left a prayer meeting in Walnut Cove just an hour before the second wreck; it happened on Highway 89—the very road I traveled to get home. Being so near the accidents, both in place and time, made me strangely affected, although I knew none of the victims.

Not knowing them didn’t matter anyway. Mothers lost sons those nights. I am a mother of two sons, so this was heart-wrenching to me.

What was also devastating was the fact that alcohol was involved in both accidents. One driver was of legal drinking age, the other was not. Legal or not, no one should drink and drive. Why is this a problem? And why does Stokes County have one of the highest rates of alcohol-related crashes in the state?

Years ago, I sat on a committee that had received a grant to study the high incidence of alcohol-influenced wrecks in the county. We spent hours searching for the root of the problem and how to resolve it. We even brought in teenagers to help. An initiative was launched to lower the number of these accidents.

And still they happen. Why?

There are many reasons: lack of fulfillment in people’s lives that leads to alcohol abuse, that youthful feeling of invincibility which results in the skewed thinking of “It can’t happen to me,” too little awareness of the dangers of drinking and driving, etc.

One of the age groups most affected is youth ages 16 to 25. We can argue that we are not training up our children in the way they should go, that peer pressure to consume alcohol is strong, that irresponsible adults are purchasing alcohol for underage drinkers.

But I will also argue that there aren’t enough worthwhile activities for youth in Stokes County, especially on weekend nights. If you’re in King, it’s a little better; you are near Highway 52 which will take you in a flash to Winston-Salem where there are multiple things to do, such as bowling or going to the movies. In King itself, there may not be too much to do except eat at a restaurant that stays open late. The Stokes Family YMCA is located there, but it closes at 8 p.m. Friday night and 6 p.m. on Saturday.

Late at night in Walnut Cove, you can go eat at a couple of restaurants. That’s about it. You can’t even do that in Danbury, Pine Hall, Lawsonville or Sandy Ridge.

There are those of us in Walnut Cove dedicated to helping local youth prosper through education, recreation, service, a move of God; we are lobbying for a recreational center in town. We argue that kids need a place to shoot basketball, have space for games/seminars/tutoring, watch movies, hold Christian youth rallies and functions.

There are not even any real parks for children. There is an outdoor public basketball court in the London community of Walnut Cove—not ideal late at night or in freezing weather. There is Fowler Park—a lovely place but one which has no bathrooms or playground equipment. What kid wants to just sit under the picnic shelter or walk around the short path? At Lions Park, there is some rather outdated playground equipment, but again, no bathrooms unless baseball games are going on nearby.

So if you are a young person in Walnut Cove on a weekend night, you can either hang out in the Food Lion parking lot or hang out in the Food Lion parking lot. And repeat.

How do we get what we need for the youth? Community involvement is a start. We need more people to care about this issue. Most adults either have children, will have children or have/will have grandchildren who need a place for wholesome recreation in town. So you SHOULD care.

Some of you have lots of money that you can’t take with you. (Yeah, I said it.) Some of you know where to find money/grants, even if you don’t have any money personally. Some of you have land that would be a perfect place to locate a rec center. Some of you have skills that could be used to construct and outfit such a place.

So what’s stopping us? I say we can have a place in Walnut Cove (and other towns) that will give our kids somewhere to go to do something constructive. Would you rather see your kids at the local rec center playing handball, basketball or Uno late on a Friday night or out on back roads drinking illegally and then driving around because there’s no place to go?

If you are willing to put your hand to the plow to make this happen, contact me; I will be glad to welcome you to the group that is pushing to provide something for our youth in this town. My heart is to bless the children. I know the Town of Walnut Cove needs revenue; that’s why the leaders push for businesses to come to Town. But can you imagine how blessed Walnut Cove would be if Town leaders would get behind the effort to bless the Town’s children? Revenue would follow, per God’s promise that if you seek first His Kingdom, everything else you need will be added.

We don’t need any more young people killed on our roads because alcohol was an easy answer for “What is there to do?” That “easy” answer often turns into something hard for all of us to bear. We’ve had enough of that. It’s time to redeem this next generation. Who’s up for the task?