I have just moved from Ladson to Joanna, South Carolina, which is about fifty miles southeast of Greeneville, South Carolina. I plan to visit friends in Laurens and possibly explore Greeneville, as I understand it has been revitalized and is an interesting city. Next I will head northward, but instead of going directly to my summertime parking space in southwestern New York State I will stop in Columbus, Ohio to meet with a study group there. I hope I am not going northward too early, my brother has been in the New York State campground for a couple of weeks and he says it has rained nearly every day and the temperature barely gets over 60 degrees. But before going into all that I had better account for the five weeks spent in Coastal South Carolina.
“Men all too often forget that God is the greatest experience in human existence. Other experiences are limited in their nature and content, but the experience of God has no limits save those of the creature’s comprehension capacity, and this very experience is in itself capacity enlarging. When men search for God, they are searching for everything. When they find God, they have found everything.” The Urantia Book (1289.2) (117:6.9)
While I was parked in Ladson our group met nearly every Sunday evening. We read Paper 130 “On the Way to Rome” and started the following paper on “The World’s Religions.” The first of these is one of my favorites as it has much inspiring teaching as well as describing the way Jesus interacted with those around him. Our group goes out to dinner before our meeting, once we went to a nearby seafood restaurant. While we were waiting for our table we started talking with another customer who is a third generation Chinese American and was in town (Charleston, Fort Sumter, etc.) from the west coast for the Civil War anniversary events. He appeared interested as we talked about the Urantia Book, hopefully he will seek more information about it.
Most of the time I was parked in Ladson I did little exploring, but I took one day to visit the “Ernest F. Hollings ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge.” This is the third NWR I have visited on my northward journey this year.
The offices for the NWR are located in a plantation house that was built in 1828 and is only one of three antebellum mansions in the area that survived the Civil War. I did take photographs of the front but I thought the above view looked more mysterious. I got a kick out of the old slave cabin, it appears they treated their slaves well; there is even a satellite dish right next to it!
The walk through the NWR was most enjoyable, I saw only a few birds but the air was filled with the sound of singing birds; at times it sounded as if I were deep in the jungle. At one point the trail went along the top of a levee between old rice fields, when the trail ended at the river the levee continued along the river but the trail was not maintained any farther, making it truly a ‘road less traveled.’ The top of the levee was covered with dry cracked dirt and a few old dried weeds; there was no trace of previous travellers whatsoever. Feeling somewhat adventurous I continued along the cracked levee. There were ducks in the river, Fiddler Crabs in the tidal mud and alligators in the ditches along the old rice fields. I had visions of stumbling over a root or tripping on a deep crack in the hard surface of the levee, then sliding downward into the waiting jaws of those alligators. Cheery thought.
On my way out I found this lily and couldn’t resist it.
"Let not the discussions of the humanity or the divinity of the Christ obscure the saving truth that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious man who, by faith, achieved the knowing and the doing of the will of God; he was the most truly religious man who has ever lived on Urantia." The Urantia Book (2090.2) (196:1.1)
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