DOWN HOME: Sky impression, faulty opinions_51903

Posted: 5/19/03

DOWN HOME:
Sky impression, faulty opinions

The skies over Texas have been looking like “a communist country” lately.

That's not a political statement. It's a flashback kid's-eye-view-of-social-studies statement.

When I was growing up–way yonder in the Texas Panhandle, where the wind scrubs the sky clean several times a day (except, of course, when it fills it with dirt from parched farmland)–I couldn't imagine smog.

One of my schoolbooks (I can't remember if it was geography or science) had a picture of a layer of gray-brown smog settled nastily amid the skyscrapers and freeways of Los Angeles. “Yeeee-oooow,” I thought. “Who would want to live in stinky ol' California?”

But that wasn't the worst of it.

Seems like every picture I ever saw of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellite puppet-government countries revealed gloomy, cloudy, smoggy skies. Every picture. I don't remember ever seeing a photograph of a sun-dappled landscape anywhere behind the Iron Curtain.

Maybe this was due to slick propaganda by pro-Western editors of social studies textbooks. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe the textbooks featured plenty of sunshiny communist countries, but I didn't pay attention.

Somehow, I grew up thinking the sun never shone behind the Iron Curtain.

So, in addition to feeling sorry for all the Soviet children being raised by “godless communist” parents, I pitied them our Texas sunshine. Not only was everything “bigger and better” in Texas, it was sunnier, too.

Those memories, long hidden by clouds of years, peeked out lately. The “Mexican smoke” that drifted up from the south has blocked out the sun, the horizon and practically anything more than a mile or so away.

“This looks familiar,” I kept thinking. Later, it hit me. “Communist countries. This looks like a picture of a communist country.”

Imagine my surprise when, as a young father, I traveled to Russia. The pristine skies over St. Petersburg delighted my eyes. The sunshine that flooded the northern countryside delighted my soul.

But that was nothing next to the joy I felt as I met, greeted, hugged and worshipped with fellow Baptist Christians. These were the same children I had pitied, imagining them growing up in homes dominated by atheism and pictures of Lenin.

Well, some of them were raised by parents who didn't believe in God or love Jesus. But many of them grew up in loving Christian homes, and all those years we were praying to the same Lord and Savior, me in Texas and they in Russia.

If I'd known the words in Russian, I would have taught them one of my favorite songs from childhood, “Heavenly Sunshine.”