Amish Walmart
Dan Kunz
If you live in southwestern Wisconsin, you may have heard of a unique place, nicknamed “the Amish Walmart”. The actual name of the business is Trail’s End, but most people call it the Amish Walmart. It is literally at trail’s end in the middle of nowhere in the “Driftless Region”, south of LaCrosse. A number of years ago, some enterprising Amish folks bought out the entire stock of an Iowa hardware store which was going out of business. They hauled it all back to rural Wisconsin and opened Trail’s End. The rest, as they say, is history. Many, many hardware stores and liquidation sales later, the Amish Walmart has a very large building, numerous semi-trailers, and acres of fields stuffed with stuff. If you need something that’s a little out of the ordinary, chances are they have it. Old axe heads – hundreds. Antique medicine bottles – dozens. Old barn beams – stacks. Storm windows and screens – pallet loads. You get the idea. I think their motto is, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”
Unfortunately, the Amish Walmart reminds me of the world’s supply of religious/spiritual opinions. If you’ve been to a Barnes and Noble bookstore or probably any other for that matter, you’ll see shelf after shelf after shelf of books dealing with God, or aspects of a spiritual life. Self-help books, parenting books, how-to-succeed-in-business books, and just about any topic you can imagine books, probably deal, on some level, with God. Of course, just like a visit to the Amish Walmart, one has to sort through a lot of “junk” to find what is really useful, or in the case of faith, what’s really true and needed. Religions which deal with “higher level” consciousness – dozens. Ones which deal with a “hidden knowledge” – hundreds. A way to heaven through your own good works – thousands. A trip to Trail’s End could take hours. A trip to find God on your own would not only take a lifetime, but it would also be fruitless.
Our Heavenly Father has already given us the “one thing needful”. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we access it in the inerrant Word of God. The treasure among the trash of the world is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We learn of him through the Bible and the Spirit gives us the faith which makes him ours for eternity. People by the millions are misled by false claims, false doctrine, and false advertising. Once we have found the truth, we need to share it with everyone we know and everyone we meet. Think of yourself as a store clerk. You can help people find what they need, even if they don’t know they’re looking for it! Romans 10:17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of Christ. Just like a one-stop hardware store, you can find everything you need in God’s Word. 2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and for training in righteousness…