Go Together

Leave a reply

My great great grandpa, William A. Caldwell appeared in the records of Greenbrier County, West Virginia in 1891 when he married Rosa A. Hoke and they began their family. Family stories recounted that he had been born in Craig County, Virginia but years of searching yielded no results until two years ago, a DNA match was the catalyst that revealed William’s mother, Mary Jane Elmore, and generations of her family.

As I have come to know Mary Jane’s family, I have wanted to go and explore the area where they lived their lives. In fact, two years ago after dropping my daughter off at school at Southern Virginia University, I found myself with a half day and set off to see what I could see before my flight left. I knew it was rural but as I lost cell coverage while traveling many miles down a gravel road, I realized that the area I wanted to explore contained no gas stations and no cell service. I started rethinking the wisdom of taking the adventure alone, amended my plans, visited some areas that were more populated and left the more rural adventure for another day. That day was this last weekend when my husband and I set off with a full tank of gas, plenty of snacks and water, and a downloaded map with Google

coordinates for the home Mary Jane would have grown up in and the cemetery where her mother was buried.

As we set off into the “wilderness”, I considered the ancestral line that settled here.  Theirs was a journey much more formidable.  These ancestors had come to Virginia in the 1600’s, settling first on the eastern seaboard and over generations, migrated south and west into North Carolina and finally north into western Virginia.  And just as I didn’t make the journey alone, they didn’t either.  They went in families; husbands, wives, and children, often following in the footsteps or being followed by the families of siblings, friends, and neighbors.  They seemed to understand the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”  
 
As families we too can feel that we are on the edge of the “wilderness” of life with so much unknown, but as we move forward, we can “choose the faithful posture of our prophet when he promises miracles in our families…a recapturing, or an echo, of the faith we had before we came to this planet.  It sees past the uncertainty of a moment, allowing us to ‘cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then…stand still.'” (Sister Tamara Runia, October 2023)
 
Families are the center of the Creator’s plan.  We trusted Him in the beginning, we can trust Him now.
 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *