Visits to Grandma’s house always included trips to “the store.” You didn’t have to ask which store. From the time I was aware, there was really only one in their tiny town, and it carried everything from nails to shoe polish, honey to hardware, soap to shotgun shells, candy to cowbells.
It was a kid’s delight, and I couldn’t imagine needing anything Edith’s store didn’t have. There was no sign that said, “Edith’s Store,” since everyone knew what it was and where it was. It seemed to me always to have been there.
I still remember the unfinished, wide-plank hardwood floor, and the warmth of the potbelly stove. My grandfather knew all of the old men sitting around grinning at us as we came in, one of them always asking him, “Phil, who’s that with you?”
Back for a family funeral a few years ago, I drove to the familiar spot. The store had vanished, a couple of tiny white frame houses occupying the lot. There aren’t any stores in town now, since the Wal-Mart opened a few miles away.
Too bad? Perhaps, but only a symptom of economic and social life today, which is witnessing the closing of businesses of many kinds that have outlived their usefulness for one reason or another. Shopping centers, investment banks, brokerages, and retail chains all are going the way of that little general store, yielding to the laws of supply and demand as we find new and better products more cheaply online, and order them from web sites and warehouses half-a-continent or half-a-world away.
What a great reminder that our world and its systems are transient. Where are the empires of Babylon and Persia, Greece and Rome? Which modern currency is without risk? What a great encouragement not to put our resources into “bags with holes” (Haggai 1:6). What an opportunity to recall that what we see is earthly, but what is unseen (God’s Kingdom) is eternal.
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:18