Central Missouri does not have much to offer when it comes to developed civilization. There's a nuclear power plant, a few towns, the capital city and some civil war memorials, but it's mostly country folk and farm life. If you dare to leave the main highway between Kansas City and St. Louis, pass through the small town of Fulton, and drive a few miles further in to the hills, you may (if you are paying attention) find the opening in the trees called Harmony Hills Campgrounds.
If you ever wanted to get away and get closer to God, going to Harmony Hill could certainly be the first step. The land was donated to the ministry decades ago by the Pain family. The Pains were (and I assume still are) godly people who owned many acres of land in that area. To get to their farm, you would need to continue on a bit farther, turn off on a gravel road and drive to the dead end.
No one has lived on the Pain farm for many years. When I was a boy visiting Harmony Hill, I remember a group of men and boys camping out in the corner of a field near the old Pain house. We stayed up late after dark and listened to the men's stories around the camp fire. The old house was rumored to be haunted, and we dared each other to go closer and check it out.
Years later, as a young man, I went back to the Pain farm. Nothing much seemed to have changed, but I took time to look around and question the mystery of the large abandoned property. The real mystery came when I walked behind the large two-story house and studied the remains of an old wooden shed. The wildlife and vegetation had claimed it. The roof had been blown off in a storm, and there was little left of the rest of the structure, but remarkably, there was still a chair at a desk. On the desk was an open book the size of a typical Bible and a pair of glasses. Because of the exposure to the whether, the pages of the book were molded together like papermashe' and unledgeable.
It seemed as though someone used that small building for quiet time and study, and one day they laid their glasses down, got up, stepped out and never returned.
How many of us are like the living dead of the Pain farm? We have the Word of life. We study it for a season and get our fill. Then, we walk away and forget to return to it's life giving pages. The walls of our little sanctuary fall apart and are blown away, but we don't even notice as we move about our busy lives far away from where we left Him.
