The message was brief but the tears were many.
“His heart just gave out.”
That’s what he had done from his heart all his life. He gave out. He gave out of a heart that was full, emptied, refilled, and given again.
To the people he loved. Out of his heart that overflowed.
That was Pastor Randy Lantz.
My wife was crying. Our wedding was the last at which Pastor Randy would officiate.
I was researching this morning for the article that follows when the news came.
The following then is dedicated to Pastor Randy.
“The Little Country Church, their Pastors, and Why They Matter”
By David and Charlotte Anderson
On May 2, 1857, a handful of people met for just the second time. The minutes of that meeting would record their commitment to build a church and a schoolhouse “on a good stone foundation.”
Little of course could they know that on that very date seventy-two years later, May 2, 1929, just a mile and a half down the country road, the deadliest tornado in Virginia history would destroy the Rye Cove School in the Appalachian highlands of Scott County, killing twelve students and one teacher and injuring fifty-four.
Over the nearly three-quarters of a century following the construction of the school and the Old Brick Church of Rye Cove, how many pairs of overalls would polish the “benches made of two-inch plank with solid backs”?
How many of those children would themselves become teachers from that Old Brick Church of Rye Cove, continuing the legacy of shaping students, characterized by ‘good foundations’ and ‘solid backs’?
Following first one country road and then the other, my wife and I were lost the day we happened upon the Old Brick Church of Rye Cove. A single bloom of a black-eyed Susan smiled shyly from near the entry. With its bright yellow petals and dark center, it seemed to peer back at us, even like the children over the years might have smiled as they mounted the steps of the Old Brick Church of Rye Cove.
As they might have likewise shyly smiled from the steps before entering their classrooms of the Rye Cove School just down the country road.
Scott County native A. P. Carter with the singing group the Carter Family, recorded “The Cyclone of Rye Cove” the year of the disaster, poignant for being the land of his childhood and home and with these final lines:
“Oh, give us a home far beyond the blue sky,
Where storms and cyclones are unknown,
And there by life’s strand we’ll clasp the glad hand,
Our children in their heavenly home.”
This is why little country churches, their pastors, and the handful of people who found and attend them matter.
They are pouring good foundations and forging strong backs of hearts and minds.
For an earthly future unknown.
With hearts that gave out.