A long time ago, in what seems like a whole different lifetime, there were a bunch of Boy Scouts at a "Camporee" who wanted to go swimming. There was a great place to do just that in those north-eastern Ohio woods, in a river that fed several of the locks of the famous Sandy & Beaver Canal a little ways downstream from there. So off they went, not thinking of their brush with history.

After swimming and splashing and having a good old time in the clear, rapidly running water that really was only about up to their waists in the deepest part one of the boys noticed a lot of very interesting river rocks. You know what river rocks are, they are smooth and roundish from having tumbled down the stream against other rocks. Well, these were all exactly the same size, and were white, red, or brown. They looked like doorknobs, and in fact that's exactly what they were. Porcelain doorknobs, all shiny and beautiful (except for the red ones, those were clay looking and lacked the glossy glass like exterior the others had been fired to.) Each knob had one little imperfection, though, a spot where the glaze had clumped up or there was a crack or something. Very strange, and there were hundreds of them once we got looking.

Now, unlike around here in New England this was a spot where there were no roads nearby, no houses or buildings, just deep woods for miles on end. How did the doorknobs get there? It was quite the mystery for us. If they had washed downstream from somewhere else, wouldn't they have scattered? But here we had found a concentration of them all in one spot. Maybe a barrel of them tumbled down the river to break here and lose its contents? There were just too many of them. To make the mystery deepen, we found them on the bank in the dirt, where it seems they had washed from into the river. So they started out on dry ground at one point, ,

This camp is near East Liverpool, once called "The Pottery Capital of the World". At one time almost two thirds of all American made pottery came from here, and customers included US Presidents. To this day there is a major pottery and ceramic industry in the area. Well, we found a camp ranger who knew of an old man that lived near the camp and sent us there. Our scoutmaster paid him a visit, and what we found out was back in the 1800's there was a mill there in the woods that was completely gone. Access roads, buildings, even the foundations were long gone and forgotten. Surprise, surprise, they used to make doorknobs. And every so often they would gather up their rejects and defects and truck them into the woods to dump.. Being porcelain, they last forever and eventually washed down a hillside into the river, where some curious scouts found them.

Except for this old timer, I don't know if anyone else knew any of this, I know the ranger didn't. Likely there were some dusty old maps somewhere that gave a vague idea if nothing else of the mills location. In the old testament, the law was "lost" for a time and events were repeated by oral tradition. Imagine today if our bibles didn't exist except for in the memories of folks. People care so little as it is, with multiple copies of the bible available to them. Would the life of Jesus just become folklore, only examined seriously when some artifact happened to surface, interesting for a time, and then forgotten?

Isn't that how many are today, who turn to God and even scriptures when in times of trouble or distress (as so many did at 911) but to then quickly forget what they may have gleaned once the trouble is past? If Jesus is the door, and he is, then the word is the door knob that opens the door for us. Better than porcelain, it truly does last forever. That doesn't mean we can't throw it out of our lives. A lot more than doorknobs could have been washed up in that river.

Randy