It’s where I’ve been for the last week, a town just like another thousand towns in a thousand other places.  There’s really nothing obvious to tell you that this little town is any different from all the rest.  It’s called Franklin, Illinois, home to around 600 people.  It’s a farming community in the vast flatness of the central Illinois prairie, not far from the home town of our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln.  Maybe if a person spends a week here in the Land of Lincoln, he is somehow easier to figure out.

Franklin has houses just like any small town.  Nothing too fancy, nothing too run down; houses that serve as family homes for regular hard-working Americans.

When I was there last week, we only had one day of sunshine; all the rest had snow and ice storms, and walking around was hazardous, and yet I was drawn to the exploration of such a unique, yet typical place.  Like all such towns that you might see in the movies, there is one diner where people gather in community; everyone knows everyone else.

Here, the people eat Midwestern “comfort food,” drink their coffee and keep up to date.  They have a park where the children play together when the weather is nice, and a school where the wider world is discussed.

Of course, there are four churches…

The day I happened past this one, you could have held an ice skating party in the parking lot!

I had a companion as I walked around town that morning…

…this guy didn’t let me out of his sight the whole time; not exactly a welcoming committee, but on this work day, the people of Franklin were doing what they do in this part of the world… working hard.

These are the people who make America what it is; these are the people who make the whole thing work.  They aren’t rich, they are still plain-spoken and they love their country, their community, their families and their God.  Yes, people in the big cities make fun of such folk out here in “fly over” country, portraying them as unsophisticated bumpkins, but I would remind these city slickers that people from towns like this have been underestimated by city folk before.  Great Americans like Lincoln, Sandberg and Truman had the last laugh as I recall.

Well dear reader, a walk through a town like Franklin doesn’t take all that long, and before you know it, you’ve reached the seemingly endless cornfields once again, but turning around for one last look into town you realize that you are visiting someplace very special indeed, and in the coming days I’ll be telling you all about it!