Let me give you readers a heads-up, maybe a warning. You might want to quit here. This STTA is more stream of consciousness than usual, perhaps rantish, and with more polical overtones than I am generally comfortable with.
I love my little community, nestled in the Alleghany (for you folk up north, that is the  way to spell it) Mountains. My town is made up of pickup-driving, deer-hunting, fish-catching, lunchbox-toting folk who have been wonderful neighbors for all of my adult life. They helped me raise my boys. Covington is a mill town. It has been for most of its history. It's just that the product "the mill" produces has changed. For all of my lifetime, and a couple before mine, our chief export has been paper/packaging and activated carbon. No matter where you are in the world there is likely to be a package on your shelf, that was once a tree that grew not far from me, and I can almost guarantee that you have driven a vehicle in which our carbon is part of the environmental control system.
It hurts me to see the forces-that-be make decisions that diminish my community. The papermill is like many industries. It has gone through a succession of mergers and sell-offs in recent decades. It appears that it has decided that as many of the people who think for their supper as possible ought to be moved to Richmond or elsewhere. The railroad made a similar decision a while back. Maybe putting all the really smart, well-educated heads all in the same place makes sense. Personally, I think it removes them from a great source of wisdom with greasy hands. When I moved to the "Highlands" about forty-five years ago, the community had a mix of managers, professi onals, and workers. Doctors and lawyers were part of the mix. Top execs sat next to newly hired high school grads at basketball games. Not only has corporate centralization of management changed all that, but amorphous entities, like market-realities and globalization have reached in with unseen hands to change my town--not for the better.
From the chair where I sit it seems clear to me. I am surrounded by mountains covered with trees. For longer than folk can remember, hearty men have hauled logs out of these hills and valleys. Millions of logs, in the days before coal was used, were reduced to charcoal to fire the early iron-furnaces of the region. Teams of horses and mules hauled gigantic logs to sawmills, train tracks that no longer exist carried bark to leather tanning plants. In a seemingly never ending procession I've seen logs, pulp-wood, and trailers full of woodchips go by my house to the papermill. Yet the mountains are green in summer and a brilliant calaidascope of color in the fall. Long ago those who think ahead realized that unless new trees were planted, or in the case of hardwoods, allowed to repopulate on their own, the resource would be gone, the soil would wash into the rivers and out to sea. Nothing of value would be left.
I wish the same kind of thinking were applied to the human-resources. I look at what my home was, what it is, and where it is headed, and I have an ache in my gut. Certain industries are built on extraction. You mine gold until it is gone, then you are done. I don't think anyone has planned to do so, but it looks like to me that my community is on that same extraction trajectory, only it's not something dug from the ground that is being extracted. It's people.
When you take a woman or a man with a PhD out of a place like Covington and move them to a place like Richmond it makes a difference. If that well-educated person is the kind that I've known over the years, they are making great contributions in the community at large, their absence from town makes it less likely that the next young engineer, school teacher, or physician who sets up shop here will choose to buy a house, put their kids in the local school, etc. etc. What I've seen happen in my time in my home, here, is the PhD gets moved to a place where you can't throw a rock without hitting someone with a graduate degree, the young professional who plies her trade here decides to live elsewhere and commute, and the sharp high-schooler sees no alternative other than relocation, again there are etc. etc. If we treated our forest resources like we are managing our human resources our mountains would be nude.
I'm not saying it is anybody's fault. I am saying that if anything is going to change somebody has to do something about it.
Believe it or not, I started in on these somewhat dark thoughts by thinking about an outreach that my church just finished. As we have for a couple of decades, Covington Bible Church hosted a Live Nativity. For free--in fact we give away cookies and hot-chocolate--we host a simple, but effective event that points people in our community to the real meaning of Christmas. Obviously I'm pleased with this event, because it is an outreach centered around the Gospel, the heart of the faith that I have spent my life proclaiming. I'm pleased, as well, however, with the fact that this is a home-grown, local, people being "good-for-nothing" effort. It is the kind of thing that people do not only because they love the Lord, but because they love their neighbors. It is our gift to our community.
No doubt a young lady who reported back to her mom has a certain measure of bias, but I was encouraged with her report. She now lives in big, Happening-place, USA. She attended a Live Nativity in her new home. She wrote back to her mom, who is a key leader/worker in our outreach, "Ours [meaning the one she grew up with] is better." I thought it was ironic when I talked to a young family after their visit to our live nativity. I asked them if they had a good time. They gave us high praise. "They used to have an event like this near our home. For some reason they don't do it anymore." The irony is, these folk are from one of those places where the upwardly mobile who work in my community often choose to live and from whence they commute to work here.
A fellow pastor has said, "The church is this world's last best hope." As I look around at my community I see that the church is one of the few entities prepared to invest in little places like the place I call home.
If you are still with me, thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed your coffee; mine was good. I need to change clothes and go down to help some guys tear down the sets from the live nativity. Tearing down, it's part of what we do to build-up our home.
It's STTA.
We thank the Lord that we were able to give this gift to our neighbors. Merry Christmas.
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