US 41

For our forty-third anniversary, my bride and I set off on an adventure.  We heard the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a beautiful place to explore in the fall.  We set out from our home to go as far north as possible in Michigan via the west side of Lake Michigan and return down the east side.  We had no other plan and no itinerary whatsoever.  While on this adventure we discovered a google map caption “The beginning of Highway 41” on the east end of Lake Fanny Hooe.  If you are lucky enough to go there, you will see the sign pictured with this blog post. 

The community I live in is called Greenbrier.  Not the one in West Virginia, the one in middle Tennessee. It sits just north of Nashville.  The city limit sign says the population is 6,445.  Greenbrier has grown around what was once a summer cooling spot for Nashville’s upper-middle-class during the summer heat.  During this time, there was a train stop in the city called Hygeia Springs.  Greenbrier’s depot was just a bit further north and became a prominent stop because of Nelson’s Whiskey Distillery.  As time passed, the bed of the railroad and the north-south highway exchanged places.  That highway is now part of Highway 41.

I have never thought about it much in the over thirty years I have lived in Greenbrier, but this highway was a major transportation route to Florida.  The section travelling through Greenbrier has been named for an influential resident named Charlie Baggett.  I was Charlie’s pastor for several years preceding his death.  He was a truly unique and colorful individual whose memory I continue to cherish.

Further south, toward Nashville, Highway 41 is called Dickerson Road.  It has several names as it traverses south until it becomes Nolensville Road on the south side of the city.  From there, I do not know the other names given to the highway by citizens who live within its commuter influence.

Eventually, Highway 41 reaches its termination in Miami, Florida.  Over its existence and between its ditches, it has carried holy men and gangsters, wanderers and intentionals, adventurers and settlers, the envied and the despised.

We did not set out to find the beginning of Highway 41.  It was just the road we ended up on as we were on our adventure.  The truth is, while we knew the highway was designated number 41, we had no idea it was “our 41” until we found and read the sign.

Here is a question I’ve pondered since.  Do the folks in Miami have a similar sign on their end of Highway 41 saying something like, “The beginning of US 41”?  Just who makes the designation of which end is the beginning and which is the end? 

I have come to think my life is like US 41 in many ways. I’ll mention just one.  As a pursuer of God, each end of my life is both a beginning and an end.  My living began in Jeffersonville, Indiana, in 1946 but it also began in the heart of God.  My life will end somewhere on down the road but my living will barely have started in the God who loves me.  Somewhere close to the beginning of my life, I accepted God’s invitation to travel with Him on the road he calls, “The Way.”  The landscape this road passed through will be an adventure I do not wish to miss.