The Old, Long Grade

The Virginia Creeper Trail here in Abingdon, Virginia, starts a few minutes from my door. Most mornings now, you’ll find it busy in the most gentle way a place can be busy; walkers and bicycles, a dog straining at the leash, a young couple pushing a stroller, an old man with a thermos who is in no hurry to be anywhere. It is one of the easiest walks in the county. Almost nobody on it stops to ask why.

Because it isn’t really a path, it’s a railroad with the rails pulled up.

For most of a century the Creeper was a working line. Steam engines crept, literally, up the long grade toward Whitetop, hauling timber down out of the mountains, iron ore, mail, passengers, whatever the high country had to send to the rest of the world. Creeping up the long grade is where it gets its name. The last train ran in 1977. The rains came, damage was done. Later the rails were lifted and the cross-ties pulled, and what remained was the bed. The grade. The patient, level road that the trains had run on.

And that grade is the thing I keep thinking about. You don’t notice it, precisely because it works. Somebody surveyed that route through some of the steepest ground in Virginia and found the one line gentle enough for a locomotive to climb. Somebody cut the shelf into the hillside, foot by foot. Somebody drove the trestles into the creek, span after span over Whitetop Laurel, so the water could go one way and the train the other. Men I never met. Most of them dead a hundred years and more. They bent their backs over that hard ground so that I could walk it on a Friday with members of our church and never once feel the climb.

We walk on graded ground. None of the graded road under our feet did we lay ourselves.

Thus says the LORD: Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls – Jeremiah 6:16.

God said that to a generation that fancied itself modern. Stop at the crossroads, He told them. Look. And ask an old question: where is the ancient path? Not the newest road, freshly cut and paved, promising a faster way up the mountain. The old one. The one already graded by people who feared the LORD long before you drew breath. The prophets. The apostles. The long line of the faithful who surveyed the hard ground of doctrine, drove the trestles, and with guidance and instruction by the Holy Spirit, found the way that actually climbs.

I have spent a good part of my life reading dead men. Spurgeon, Owen, Pink, Watson and Flavel, and the other Southern divines, half-forgotten, out of print, their books going soft with the humidity in church basements. People sometimes ask, kindly, why a minister bothers with men who have been in the ground for two and three hundred years. The honest answer is the same reason I walk the Creeper. They graded the way. They cut a shelf into ground I would never have the strength to cut for myself, and I would be a fool to insist on hacking a fresh trail up the cliff face beside it just to say the route was mine.

That is the conceit of every age, really, to think the path begins with us. That nothing true was seen before we opened our eyes. The man on the Creeper Trail who imagines he is the first to find this quiet way through the mountains is only ignorant of the surveyors. And the Christian who imagines his faith starts fresh with his own clever reading is only ignorant of the saints who laid the bed he is standing on.

Notice, too, what the ancient path is for. Find rest for your souls. Not novelty. Not a thrill. Not the rush of cutting something new. Rest. The old way is the restful way, because it was graded by people who had already walked it all the way home and knew where the difficult places were.

So I’ll keep walking it, that is, the literal one down the street, and the older one it keeps preaching at me. Stand at the crossroads. Ask for the ancient path. Walk where the faithful walked. There is rest to be had on that grade, the whole way up the mountain, and for one plain reason: Another went up the grade ahead of us all and laid the length of it with His own body, so the climb that should have broken us is a road we can walk with a hope and an assurance given to us by the steadfast love, grace and mercy of our Heavenly Father.

Thank You, Lord, for the old, good way. Amen.