The Rock Table
Many Sunday dinners and family reunions were spent around Pa Pearman's rock table.
The old table was about an eight-foot slab of granite sitting on a stack of cement blocks.

On   Sunday afternoon, our family would meet there. Each would bring a covered dish and there we would share a meal and play out under the oak trees, or swing in the tire until it was time to go home. The food was so much better served on that old rock table under the shade trees. But there is another reason that old table is so special.
On any given weekday, the County Road Crew (prisoners) would come out and work on the dirt roads or plank bridges that surrounded Pa Pearman's house.

Many were the times my Pa or Uncle Bud and Aunt Ruth would fry chicken and make biscuits or maybe cut up a watermelon, and feed the prisoners that were working. As a child I was frightened of the prisoners and would wonder why my family would do such a thing. I remember hiding until they were gone back to their work.

But now I look back on those days and I realize that the old slab of rock became a communion table. For every prisoner served on it was in remembrance of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As Jesus said:
 
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."         Matthew 22:37-39

Sharing The Dipper
As children my brother and I loved going to the country to visit our Pa Pearman. He and
Uncle Bud lived together in a farmhouse surrounded by cow pastures and dirt roads. My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Harold lived close by and it was always a special time for us when we visited. Some of the things I remember most were just simple things that stayed fresh in my mind until today. You felt welcomed from the time you got out of the car until you left to go home. They met you with a smile and a hug. Next question would be "Are you hungry?" I can never remember going there when there wasn't a table full of the best country cookin' this side of Heaven.

As good as all that sounds it still isn't my favorite memory. My uncle Bud always had a bucket of water drawn and just above it, on a nail was a dipper and nothing hit the spot better than drinking from that dipper. It would quench the greatest of thirsts. Many were the times my brother, cousins and I would play outside until we were completely exhausted to go in the house and pass the dipper around 'til we were all surely about explode. After a few minutes of catching our breath we left rested and completely satisfied from thirst.
       
Thinking back to that time in my life it brings to mind another time someone shared a dipper of the water with a woman at a community well. Jesus went to the well and there he met a woman scorned by the town because of the lifestyle she had chosen then the scripture says;
 
 Jesus said, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whosoever drinks the water I give him (living water) Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”    John 4:13-14
  
In reading the rest of the scripture we see the woman not only got her thirst quenched, but she found forgiveness and rest. She went away completely satisfied because Jesus Christ took the time to share a dipper. Have you drank from "The Dipper" and if so will you pass it on........

Jonsey’s House
A favorite childhood memory was picking wild flowers with my aunt. On Sunday afternoons we would gather at Pa Pearman's house for an afternoon of rest and just being together with our families. Sometimes during those gatherings, my aunt would take me for a walk and we would pick flowers along the way. We could always find the most beautiful flowers blooming in the yard of an old abandoned home place that was just down the dirt road from my Pa Pa's house. All my life I had heard the shade tree conversations of the misfortune and tragedies of the family that lived in the house, now falling down with age. You could see old fabric still hanging from the windows and pieces of old furniture through the openings that once were doorways.
   
As a child, I often stood there thinking of the stories I'd heard and would try to picture the lady that lived there. My heart seemed to break thinking of how she might have felt. I also wondered, seeing things through the eyes of a child how such beautiful flowers could grow there in what seemed to me an unhappy place?
 
Looking back now, many years later as a grown up I can answer that question. God was revealing Himself to her. He was letting her know that even in the darkest of times, He was with her. He was her light at the end of the tunnel and strength to face the day. She could just look out her window and see the amazing hand of God and join Him in the cool of the day in her garden of wild flowers sown by the Master's hand.
 
"Come unto me, all ye that labour and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;for I am meek and lowly at heart:and ye shall find
rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."     Matthew 11:28-30

The Rock Table, Sharing The Dipper, and Jonsey’s House are all written by Janet Atkin