Grace and Gratitude

by Rusty Cockrell, photographer and videographer

For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.  - Psalm 100:5

At least every two years since I've been alive, we have gone to Enid, Oklahoma, to have our Esau family Christmas rendezvous at my grandparents’ home. Sometimes we would go Thanksgivings, and sometimes on a whim. Now that I’m a grown man, we only make it every two years for Christmas. But my first memories of that place were forged in those long December trips across the abomination that is I-40 -- the 10 hour stretch of death from Memphis all the way across the rice fields of Arkansas, to Tulsa.

To this day, this is where my memory flies every single time. I can see it now. We are exiting off that interstate onto the Muskogee turnpike, then pulling up to the booth and paying the first of five tolls. Then two straight lanes…for miles. On either side there’s a dormant ocean of cut corn, dotted with the green pop of the winter wheat. Golden pastures with every domestic breed of cattle known to man are bedded down in the sunshine. I see the never-ending fence lines and the giant grain silos rearing their heads on the horizon.

           

Grandma and Grandpa’s house was modest, a small, white two story house in a subdivision. My grandparents had 10 children, and I still have no idea how we possibly fit our gigantic family into that house during Christmas.  But what mattered was everybody in that room came from Harold and Leona.  Their children’s spouses were adopted into the family.  It was our homecoming.

One of my many talented aunts would play the piano and everybody would sing together in harmony.  The Bible would open, and Grandpa would read the story of Jesus and that night that changed the course of each and every one of our lives.  I remember his enormous hands grasping that wrinkled cover.  He spoke with mild inflection, but he read intentionally, firmly,  holding on to the word of God as if it was his very life, because it was.  He lived by it more diligently than anybody I have ever known.  I say that with the utmost sincerity.  He was a common man, an ordinary man by the world’s measure.  But I for one saw it in his pale eyes even when I was a kid.  I heard it in his voice, in his conversations, in his prayers.

We would always stay for many days during Christmas, sometimes long after everybody had filtered back toward their corners of America.  The Esau family would dissolve from the gathering.  Those were always sad times.  And it’s still sad whenever we have to hug somebody’s neck and say goodbye.  

Rusty Cockrell has attended the Hampton Cove campus for several years.  He serves in Student Ministry as a small group leader and also chaperones many student road trips (God bless him!).  Rusty is also a videographer and has shared that talent with several different ministries here at Cove Church.  You can read more of Rusty's story here.