Cahaba

I’ve always had a thing for rivers. Oceans are nice, lakes are cool, but rivers are the water source that captures my mind. Look at a U.S. map sometime and see God’s own highway system that cuts across our land. Amazing!  

My love of rivers started as a child. The Alabama River runs through Selma where I spent much of my childhood. There’s a lot of history associated with that river, from the Edmond Pettus Bridge to tunnels leading from the city to the river’s bank. During the Civil War the tunnels were used to vacate the city during the Battle of Selma.

The Alabama River is great but my favorite river from my home state is a river that feeds the Alabama: the Cahaba. The Cahaba River is named after the first capital of Alabama that is nothing but a ghost town these days. The once bustling community was abandoned in the 1870’s due to its swampy conditions conducive to cholera and the likes. What did come into existence a century later was my grandfather’s fishing cabin. It was cheap property due to the area’s propensity to flood.

Running those abandoned dirt streets of Cahaba was some kind of fun! I had zero male siblings or first cousins, so it was just me and the haints. I was scared to death of them, and they probably were of me. There wasn’t anything around for miles and I was probably the first human on those streets in decades. My grandfather could drum up some tall tells that would have my neck hairs fully erect. Leaving the cabin at night was a full-on call to courage. No matter how much my Sunday School teacher denied the existence of ghosts, that fear always had a way of capturing my mind.

My Grandaddy’s presence changed things. If he was there, I felt like the two of us could take on anything natural or unnatural that we might encounter. One of our favorite pastimes was taking the boat upriver around dusk and running trotlines. The beauty of the river and its surroundings were never lost on me.

What I loved the most about this river was the position of my grandfather’s cabin at its very end. But it wasn’t the end. In a larger since, it was just the beginning! The water being borrowed by the Cahaba was handed over to the Alabama right at the point of my grandfather’s cabin. The Alabama would take possession for a time only to be handed over again to the Gulf of Mexico. Through the creativeness of Almighty God, that water would start the cycle again leading to a ceaseless supply that’s still filling the Cahaba today.

Our lives can relate to that river. We’re a channel of God’s blessing not a storage unit. When we come to the end of ourselves, we discover a connection with something far greater. We also discover that God’s provision outpaces any amount we could possibly release.

I haven’t been back to that river in years. But I hope it won’t be much longer. Those are memories with my grandfather I’ll forever cherish. He’s still teaching me life lessons 7 years after he’s gone. I miss him so much. He was always my biggest fan and understood me in a way no one else has replicated.

Life lessons on a river. The Cahaba will always be my favorite.