Can It Be?

(including the above pic for no other reason but that I love the outfit...I'm so copying it, this fall) 

Can it be that this weekend is....over?  Already?  Can it be that it is 10:58 on a Sunday night, and tomorrow is Monday morning?

The weekend began Friday afternoon, Hannah, Sarah, and Jonathan in tow, with a short drive to look at a house up for sale, in town.  This house is an adorable bungalow complete with large, open porch and big columns.  Inside are hardwood floors, doors with the original hardware, built in book cases and window seats.  Big rooms, high 10-foot ceilings.  White paint everywhere.  Bright and airy.  

But the exterior of this house is in need of every sort of work.  New roof.  Siding.  Paint.  Windows.  Structural issues.  You name it, this house needs it.  Inside, it needs a whole new kitchen, from the floors up.

A dream to be sure.  My Tim and I could purchase this house and renovate it, true to the style.  If we could sell our current house, this one would be neither out of our price range, nor out of the range of our ability.

But it is out of our range of priority, in this season.  Life is about so much more than finally having that architecturally authentic and interesting home I've always wanted.  Believe me, I have to remind myself.  However, it is always such fun to look.

Then there was our church's ladies' meeting on Saturday.  Oh.  My. 

Law, these women are such fun.  They are twelve ways of sweet and bushels of delight to my soul.  How we laughed, around that lunch table, the tang of basil and tomatoes and olive oil on our tongues.  The glass trifle bowl piled brimful with fresh berries, graciously provided by our hostess (along with lunch!) was pure art - I wish I had brought my camera.

Then there was our college team's football game.  Our team lost, but I still won - any girl who gets to host 13 people for dinner and a game, all hooting and hollering, who gets to sit and listen to daughters and their husbands, sons and their girlfriends, sons and their friends (and those friends' girlfriends) is a blessed and highly favored girl.*

Then there was church...we baptized the sweetest little boy, which was a dream come true for his grandmother, who did the baptizing. 

Pastor Tim, having a very grown up talk with a boy wanting to be baptized...

His young footprints, wet in the carpet, making a path back through the center of the church amongst smiling faces and clapping hands...those soaked barefoot prints were a sight for these eyes.  Oh, the water-logged foot-trails we've made this summer, from the baptismal tank to the back of the church!  It has been The Summer of The Baptism.  May it be so next summer, next week, and forever.

Then, there was time with family - my brother in law's birthday party.  A sweet ending to an equally sweet weekend.  Looking at my sister is like looking in a mirror on a really fantastic hair day.  (She got all the hair genes in the family...not fair.  So not fair.)  She and I both have had people we don't know, but who the other knows, approach us and tell us "...you have to be her sister...you have the same mannerisms, the same laugh, and look so much alike!"

Sometimes I wonder if we are one soul in two bodies.  But then again, we are just enough different, I know it can't be that.  Believe it or not, she's sassier than I.  She don't take no crap, and does not suffer fools or liars or social snobs.  Heaven help the people who have ever done me wrong - if they happen to cross paths with my sister, they'd best turn and look for someplace to hide.  She might tell them where to go and how to get there.

Can't tell you how heartwarming and comforting it is to have a sister like that.  She's every kind of beautiful to me.

The weekend is over, and I have been flawlessly cared for by a mighty God.

Okay.  I think I'm done.  I still don't believe the weekend is over!

~~~~~~~

*that would be me...in case you were wondering who the Blessed Girl might be...

Glass As Art

Here is the picture, as promised...

Didn't she do a great job, for her very first stained glass project, ever??

Oh, and the vintage-style phone is one of my favorite finds of the summer.  I found it at an antique shop in Oak Ridge for thirteen dollars and change.  At the Pottery Barn, right this moment, these phones are sixty or seventy dollars.

Going back to stained glass as art, you too can have a Sarah Howe Original...for a price.  Sarah's dream is to find her own artistic niche - and maybe stained glass is it!

Long Day

For some reason, in my head I'm hearing the song "This Long Day Is Over" sung by Norah Jones.  Maybe because this day has seemed a bit long...I've been feeling a little under the weather.  Nothing to do with yesterday's funnel cake sticks, mind you.  This is all allergy, inner ear, sinus, sleepy, foggy, sore throat gar-bahge.

::she brightens::

But my daughter Sarah made me a beautiful, framed stained-glass piece.  It is her first stained glass project, and it turned out well, and I am the proud owner of the gift!  The colors are all the soft, quiet tones I am so absorbed with in this season of my life...white, tone-on-tone, aqua blue, amber colors...Sarah created a bird on a branch, all in stained glass.  It sits on my kitchen windowsill, and fascinates me, because it looks one way when the sun streams through it, another way when it is dark outside, and still yet another way when it is daylight, but no direct sun.  I was going to take a picture of it for you, but when I went to boot up my camera, it is slap out of juice.

::sigh::

Add that to my list of things to do tomorrow:  bake an apple crumble, do all my regular Thursday chores, lecture on satire for our home school, oversee assignments in said school, knit some more on the scarf I'm working on, go get batteries, take pictures for my blog.

Which reminds me, you'll be excited to know (??!) I'm close to mastering f-stops.

::cheers, confetti::

Which is another reason I need batteries, and add that to my list of things to do tomorrow:  fiddle around with aperture and f-stops some more.  Tomorrow.  For now, this Long Day is Over.


Long Day Is Over
by Nora Jones


Feeling tired
By the fire
The long day is over


The wind is gone
Asleep at dawn
The embers burn on

With no reprise
The sun will rise
The long day is over

Being Bad Never Tasted So Good

If you like funnel cake, run, don't walk, to your local Burger King.  For real. 

So I went out this evening, all by myself.  I ended up being bad.  Very bad.  Not only did I shop (for other people's birthdays, so its okay) I decided to run through the BK drive-thru for a coffee, and spied an advertisement for this:

 Funnel Cake Sticks.  Gentle reader, I did something completely out of character. 

I ordered them.

And ate every.  single.  one.

::hand on heart, eyes rolling in an only slightly exaggerated expression of complete bliss::

Ssssssseriously.  So, so good.  I sat there in my car, and quite nearly hugged myself in gluten-ous, sugar-fied, deep-fried joy.  I was being bad, and I was loving it.  All that gluten and sugar, deep fried, just because I can.  Don't hate on me for it. 

I'll be walking my three miles in the morning.

As I drove home, on a dangerous carb high, I noticed the driver behind me was...shall we say "unhappy" with the speed I was driving.  He was all over my back bumper.  He tail-gated my backside all the way up Schaad road.  Suddenly, I saw the traffic light just ahead, and a (again, completely uncharacteristic) thought hit me.  Maybe...just maybe...this traffic light would change at just the perfect moment.  I slowed down even more.

I saw my chance for vengeance.

The deep fried funnel sticks made me do it, I swear.

I timed it perfectly.  The light did change from green to yellow, and I hit the gas...and the guy behind me could not make it.  This intersection happens to be monitored by Big Brother and his camera, so running a red light is costly and the tail-gating truck knew it.  He had to slam on his brakes.

I threw my head back in glee....and heard an evil laugh come rolling out of me!  It sounded sort of like "muuuaaaahahahaha..."

I have got to get me some more funnel cake sticks.  They make me sassy.

Upon my arrival home, I did my best to put on an innocent face.  Then, I just blurted it out as I came in the door - "I found the most yummy thing in God's earth for only one dollar seventy-nine cents!"

My man took one look at me, surveying me up and down as he is wont to do - we haven't stayed married for twenty-four years for no reason - and said, crisply ~

"I can see.  What's that all over your skirt?"

It was powdered sugar.  Lots of it. 

I was bad.  And I think I will be bad again someday.

Missional is Personal

We are a missional people, who serve a missional God.  Ours is a vast, overarching purpose, and that purpose is the glory and praise of God.

I get it. 

I say "True, and true again."

But I've seen a bit of Gentile legalism creep into the missions mindset.  When we veer away from God's heart of grace, even a little bit, we end up far away from the goal in the end.  When a missions mindset is birthed from being love-sick, it is powerful.  But when it becomes a measuring device with which to rate a church's or believer's quality of devotion, we've slipped into a works mentality that is anti-mission, anti-gospel, and anti-grace.

Missional is forever personal.  Every concept you and I carry about our God has to be properly rooted in Genesis - every thought about God and what we imagine His "purposes" to be, must begin with God Himself.  God could have created an army with which to accomplish heavenly work, but no.  He created one man and one woman, to whom He gave unearned dominion, and with whom He simply would walk and talk in the cool of the day.  And He still is lavishing unearned favor to sons and daughters that He simply wants to walk and talk with. 

If I make the gospel as personal as God makes it, I am going to sound...maybe...just a little bit...."man centered".  Does that mean the gospel I have come to believe is man centered?  Not in the least.  I will go so far as to say that if I have not made the gospel intensely personal, if I do not bask in the love of God for me personally - me, Sheila Atchley - I will ultimately be a hindrance to the mission.

And I will ultimately be a pain in the behind of my brothers and sisters in Christ, and a sharp ache in the neck of my leadership in my church.  Because I will have made it all about "mission" instead of Presence.  King David was a man after God's own heart, not because he focused on some big-mission-picture, but rather because all he really wanted, was to be in the presence of God 24/7...so much so, he put the ark in his back yard.

Christ didn't die for a mission.  He died for a people.  The people He died for, are made up of individuals.  Christ paid the ultimate price, for you and for me, and that is forever the Gospel.

Bottom line, I will never...ever...be able to give to you what I don't own for myself.  I'd love to give you a lake house and a brand new SUV, but I don't own any of those things.

The gospel of God is all about the unbalanced, crazy, mighty, unending grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  I have to own that for myself to be able to give that away. 

I have to be in the presence of God, up close and very very personal, to have the fragrance of Christ all over me.  I have to carry something of the manifest presence to be of any effect whatsoever.  Who are we, to think for a moment, that anything of any lasting value can be accomplished apart from the supernatural presence of God? There is no mission without utter, naked intimacy.  There are no children, there is no heritage, no reproduction without intimate presence.

One thing have I desired of the Lord, and that alone will I seek after.  Not to be a heavy hitter in some divine Mission Impossible, but rather to be Song of Songs intimate with the God who loves me.

Me.  Me, me, me.  You heard me.  I said the "m" word.  Oh, how He loves me!  He is jealous for me...

It's Football Time in Tennessee!

Full house, this evening, as family and friends gathered here at the cottage for the first UT football game of the season.  Our beautiful Neyland Stadium looks amazing, after renovations, and our team played well.

It was tons of fun, listening to my boys' bantering back and forth.  I love that they want to bring their friends to the house for the game...we grilled hamburgers, I made home made cole slaw, Tim passed football with all the guys while Sarah and I walked her puppy Amber...the weather has been absolutely picture-perfect, and there is a delightful nip in the air.  We may set record lows this evening...but not quite chili weather.

Hope springs eternal in a University of Tennessee Volunteer heart.  A Tennessee football fan, a true one, is no band-wagoner.  We stay true.  We've a new coach who seems like he will be a man we can be proud of (after the Year That Never Was, with the Worst Leader Ever.  Last year, we had a "coach" - term used loosely - who came in declaring his love and committment to the team, only to leave abruptly.  Of course, he justified himself the whole way.  People like him always do.  No matter.  A man is forever characterized by how and why he leaves, whether it be how he leaves a party, a relationship, a neighborhood, a church, a coaching job, or a life.  Our former team leader has indeed become a byword and a source of unending, scathing amusement to an entire city...no one respects him, no one ever will.  Because of the way he left.)

And now, the crickets softly chirp outside the window by my bed.  My puppy is by my side.  My team won - and watching them run through the 'T' as the game began was thrilling for us all.  We hooted and hollered.  As I prepare my heart for gathering for worship with all my friends tomorrow morning, I'm smiling.

The lines have most definitely fallen in good places for me, I have such a goodly heritage.  God has given me sons and daughters and a husband and friends and football, and I find that to be a lovingkindness above and beyond measure. 

It's a GIRL!

(babies make us so happy we're singing - and it's a good thing, since we're having one, and our church family is expecting FOUR!)

Please let me introduce you to the most fun couple you will ever meet - Michael and Megan.  All of Harvest Church adores them, you'd love them to.  They discovered a few months ago that they are expecting a wee one, in January!

They found out today that their baby is a.......GIRL!

Her name? 

(oh, it is so precious, it almost stops my heart.  Are you ready for this?)

Her name is Gabriella Grace Ann Cummins.  We will all have the blessing of calling her Gabbi Grace.

::happy squeak::

You have to know how perfect this name is for the little daughter of Michael and Megan Cummins!