Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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I'll never do justice to Sunday's Homecoming at the Shiloh Union United Methodist Church in Catawba.

First, there was the food spread out on long tables at the picnic shelter:

Fried chicken, green beans, meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, potato salad, macaroni salad, deviled eggs, ham biscuits, garden salad, fruit salad, sweet potatoes, brownies, chocolate cakes and pies, chocolate chip cookies and pecan pie.

And that was just my plate.

Then there were the people: Goldie Garman, 96, who could play every song in the Broadman Hymnal on the piano by ear; Avis Garman, 85 and looking 65; Lucille Garman, just out of the hospital with a heart problem and scheduled for surgery soon; Earl Taylor, the woman I wrote about last week, who turned 100 on Monday and has a sister who is 105.

And Earl Sirry, cattle farmer and retired dairy farmer, who is 80, and his wife, Elva, with whom he ran away and got married in Tennessee 58 years ago; and their son, Dale, a lifetime country boy in his 50s who has taken up hiking and does a 10- to 20-miler most every Sunday afternoon.

And Henry Halsey, who worked in a furniture factory for decades and displayed the same loyalty to his duties as Sunday school superintendent, and Wayne Gauldin, who sang "How Great Thou Art," and on and on and on.

Good people, sincere in their fellowship and inspiring in their faith, people of a kind not likely to pass this way again.

And the little white church, 149 years old, with a sign inside saying last week's attendance was 47, about the norm.

And the sloping green pasture outside the windows to the west. The young people's choir. The cool morning air. Some things that have changed, and many things that haven't changed a bit.

These are the people who taught me and my family about humility and service, the ones who clustered around in our times of suffering and loss, who took a country church and turned it into more than a postcard image -- they made it a spiritual home.

We'd been gone from the area for seven years, my kids and I, and we were brought back by Earl Taylor's centennial party. We loved every minute, even though our inner minds stirred with memories too painful to contemplate, of when Sharon, my wife and my kids' mother, sat with us in the second row at Sunday school and the world seemed just about complete.

That's all this column is about: goodness. You don't find it often, and when you do, the memory of it sticks with you forever.

It's beyond money and beyond fame.

It is real, and it is the foundation of a blessed life.

Joe Kennedy's column runs Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.