The Year of the Harvest

As a body of believers called Harvest Church...as a spiritual community...as a passionately artistic and musical and prophetic tribe...as a bunch of friends who love to laugh and do life together...

...we are so sold out to the Gospel.  We are still smack-dab in the middle of a torrent-flow of grace, and there is no going back...ever.  We have, each one, paid a high price to be faithful to the message of reconciliation.  Many of us are being forced to live it out painfully, in our own households, where no one applauds or appreciates.  Those not having to live out the grace-Gospel in their own households, are - with all their hearts -  standing with those who daily watch with longing for a prodigal's return.  When you love someone, their prodigal becomes yours too.  And it hurts.

No easy life...no "marshmallow world in the winter" for a Harvester.

But just you wait.  Just you wait and see what God will do.

In the summer of 2009, a prophetic minister out of the UK called the Preacher and I out of a crowd, and spoke over us a word of incredible financial prosperity, an unquestionable affirmation of  "the Gospel we preach" (this minister had never met us, and had no clue what we were, that very day and that very week, going through);  he said that God was pleased with what we preach, but more importantly, He was pleased with how we were painfully (the very word used!) living it out in our home...and he spoke a declaration over us that there is a strong anointing on our lives for the return of the Prodigal.

We knew right then that 1.  We were in for some financial hits, and 2.  The accusations against us and what we preach would continue, and 3.  That we would have to stand in utter faith for who knows how long until we saw even one prodigal coming "a long way off".  The prophetic is like that...a word from God rarely comes to pass on Tuesday.  Rather, it is meant to equip you to wage war...for the long haul.

But the Preacher and I were, at that moment, equipped to stand strong...caught up into heaven, so to speak, and given an inexplicable ability to see from the vantage point of the Finished Work of Christ.

And then...a year ago...we saw the First Fruits of our prophetic word:

Do you see the man, towards the center of the frame, hands clasped in front of him, lifting his voice in praise?

A prodigal of 25 years.  Suddenly... he came home.  Is still home.  I mean...he's home.  Every Sunday, when I hear this man worship God with all his heart, I know that if God can bring this son home, He can bring ANYONE'S dear one home.  There is not a man anywhere like Bobby - all he has to do is show up, and your faith is built, and you find yourself believing that all things are possible.  He has the strongest anointing for encouragement I have ever seen on anyone, period.  No lie...all he has to do is show up, and you are changed.

I think every prodigal we see come home will be like this one...exactly like the First Fruits of the word of the Lord to us and to Harvest Church. Each one...strongly anointed for prophetic worship...with the affection of the Father hovering over them like a sweet and heavy perfume.  Just like Bobby.

If you know and love a prodigal of any age...Harvest Church is the place to be.  Get here, fast.

Just sayin'.

I would be less than honest not to tell you.  And it would be less than faith not to declare it.

Word For 2013

2012 was an outrageously blessed year...

...it fulfilled the name I named it. 2012 so, so lived up to its name: "Cultivate"

Many amazing things were accomplished in 2010, named "Create". Create, I did...everything from a whole wedding event, to teaching myself how to knit.

Giving 2011 a name was life-altering. I was set utterly free from oppression I have yet to really talk in detail about...stories are still inside me, waiting for their time to be told. 2011 was named, "Sow!" There was an urgency to the word. I sowed with all my heart, in unexpected places, not where it was "expected" of me. I shook off the false expectations of others that year. I began to conceive of a life apart from the typical roles I had played all my adult life.

And it made me a far better wife, mother, and Preacher's Wife.

2012, I simply kept up the momentum. I continued to cultivate the conditions for personal growth, apart from the blessing of my sons, who are working on their testimonies, and even the blessing of daughters, who are working on their beautiful lives. The successes and perceived failures of daughters or sons didn't even slow me down. I just stayed rightly related, enjoyed life, and cultivated my own gifts.

The payoff? The Preacher's namesake now lives next door...an insanely perfect blessing. My grandson, daughter and son in law moved out of our home, buying the house next door. It felt amazing to know that living with us for a season (while Justin finished his Master's and internship) helped them achieve that dream.

A youngest son's high school graduation. A home education triumph, to be sure.

New business started. My art...in a Knoxville boutique! My art...sold as far away as New Zealand, the UK, and California.

New art studio designed and installed.

New car.

New granddaughter....who just last week moved to a cute house, with her mommy and daddy...a house with a studio and workshop for her artist-daddy...on 11 acres...2 miles away from my front door. Insanely perfect blessing! My cup runneth over.

And now...2013 also has a name. And it is big. For me, this is a leap of faith that excites me out of my mind! My word for 2013?

HARVEST



An explosion of new life. Abounding fruit. Abiding fruit. To my account.

Every prayer that I've prayed.

Every seed that I've sown.

Desires of my heart, He's preparing to grow.

Am I ready???


Written for you with love...
Sheila Atchley
All blog content is the property of the writer, including all "In the Middle" intellectual and visual art property...

Hal Borland, from his lovely book Sundial of the Seasons

(Image from the lovely blog Dear Lillie)

Sundial of the Seasons is a nature / natural science book I often utilized in the home education of my four children. It is out of print, but is worth tracking down for middle school nature studies. I always found Borland's writings to be factual, yet beautiful and comforting....and most importantly for educational purposes, his words encouraged wonder.

An excerpt, entitled, "The Winter Stars - December 28"

"The Great Bear is now down on the horizon at evening, come down, the legends say, to wash his paws in the deep December lakes before they are all iced in. And the Little Bear hangs by his tail from the North Star. Cassiopeia, the queen, sits high in the sky, and off toward the west, Cygnus, the swan, is in flight toward another hemisphere, the eternal migrant. The Big Dog and the Little Dog, off to the east, watch Orion, the Hunter, as he faces Taurus and the Zenith. Almost overhead are the Pleiades, those seven shy sisters who are best seen from the corner of the eye.

These are star nights, with the moon late rising, in its last quarter today, and with Winter-Brilliant skies. Walk the countryside these evenings and the whole universe accompanies you, for the earth is all open now to the starlight, leaf fall complete. The stars lean so close that if one stood tiptoe on the highest hill, he might grasp at least one star in his tingling fingers.

It is illusion, of course, but the December stars seem twice as brilliant as those of June, for the sky is doubly clear, the mist chilled out of it, and the dust of summer settled at last. An illusion, but a pleasant one on a brittle night; the sun seems so far away that the stars should come closer. We should be able to glimpse eternity through those spark holes in the blanket of the long night. And perhaps we do. Where else is such order, such eternal pattern, as in those stars that light the winter sky?"


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Faithful Friends Who Are Dear To Us...Gather Near To Us Once More...

We sincerely pray...




....that you and yours experience the value of faithful friends...




...and a loving, grace-filled family....
.




....as you celebrate Life in Christ, this weekend, and on into next week....




Thank you, from my heart, for the even more new art and business community friends I have met both online, and in person in 2012, and those new friends who we hope and plan to meet sometime in 2013. As our own children have grown up and become our true friends, we are struck by the wealth one has, in the form of a few faithful friends.


We love and greatly esteem our parents....and those young ones...and those middle age and aged ones, in addition to our faithful children and their spouses....we who have stuck and stayed, have built an artful, soulful, faithful continuity....in fact, a strong spiritual community...we did it, through good and bad times.


Merry Christmas to our faithful friends. Can't wait to go before The Lord with you in the morning..."dancing with our Father God in fields of grace..."

Hope You Are...

...enjoying this time of the year as much as we are.


In the Grip of His Amazing Grace,

Sheila Atchley

All blog content is the property of the writer, including all "In the Middle" intellectual and visual art property...

T'was a "Hobbit In 3-D" Sort of Evening...

I gotta tell ya...it rocks to be young and in love. We had so much fun this evening.



Grace and Peace,
Sheila Atchley

All blog content is the property of the writer, including all "In the Middle" intellectual and visual art property...

5 Ways To Celebrate the Simplicity of This Simple Season

(The Preacher, our Monkey-grandson, and me...riding the choo choo at the mall...)

Years back,  the holidays used to bug me. And they still can, if I don't remain vigilant to look past the trappings and into the heart of God.  The crude commercialization. The old Christmas carols, ruined by pretty-boy bands. The extra work combined with the shortened energy levels that come with less daylight. Yet - at the same time, I have always found ways to love Christmas.  Each late-November, I begin to reach down deep inside - where the presence of God dwells -  and I figure out how it is that I, Sheila Atchley, celebrate the Reason for the Season.

So.  I'm not a "bah-humbug" in any sense of the word.  Even though the song "Santa Baby" still gives me a fit of tourette syndrome.  I twitch.  I exclaim.   

In spite of it all, the last several years I've not encountered the slightest negativity inside. After a great deal of amazed pondering, I offer you a few thoughts - humble, not at all earth-shaking, and maybe not even blog-worthy, but nevertheless...I've discovered what, for me, puts the joy in this simple season. 

1. Celebrate your way. 

In years past, I had begun allowing others to dictate the season to me (and much of my time all year 'round, in fact), in the sense that if they invited me over, I felt obligated to accept for various reasons - to help them through a time of transition, to cheer them up, to just have fun, to assist in this or that, to prevent them from having to be alone. This translated into me always "going", and cutting way, way back on what I love - which is nesting.  Having people in my home, spending time with my family. Over the months and even years I had allowed others to dictate my time, I didn't realize how deeply it was suffocating me. Out of love, out of an honorable motive, I was allowing myself to be squeezed and molded into someone else's agenda. So, these last several years,  I have spent the Christmas season exactly how I want to spend it...doing what I love, for heaven's sake! Filling my home with people and things and activities I love. No apologies. I've had a stern talk with myself. I said, "Self, never again will you take what makes your own heart sing, and put it on a shelf in a misguided effort to help someone else's heart sing. They must find their own song, and they must learn to sing it."

2. Get outside. 

"....and heaven and nature sing..." remember the old carol? Creation - nature -  is God's means of soothing the human heart. Don't let the cold weather prevent you from getting outside, filling your bird feeders, taking a walk, surveying your winter landscape....just breathing in the chill air, appreciating the change in season. Embrace it.

3. Make something. 

Pick just one or three projects you've always wanted to try (but never had time, because you were too busy being somewhere else all the time) and block out an afternoon or two and just do it. Arts and crafts are vastly underrated for their therapeutic benefits.  Each and every year, I make a real-green wreath, all sorts of evergreen arrangements, cookies;  this year, I am making hand painted ornaments, blocks for my grandbabies, holiday aprons, sugar scrubs for my girlfriends, and  I plan to clove some oranges for a scented arrangement...and I am going to take glittered snowflakes, and hang them from bare branches in a large cachepot, as a winter arrangement I'll keep in my house until March 1st.

4. Read what inspires you. Self explanatory.

5. Selah. (in Hebrew, it means "pause and deeply consider"). 

Selah over what God is saying to your heart this season. Mull over the good news of grace. Ponder "peace on earth, and goodwill to men". Your God is in a good mood, friends, His anger was completely spent at the cross. Christ took the penalty and punishment for you, and for your children. This is crazy-good news. Reason to rejoice. Those swaddling clothes wrapped the baby Christ, He submitted to them, and then those graveclothes were removed once and for all in the tomb, as the Risen Christ came out of it victorious...for you.

Trust me, this gets dangerous when you begin to take the truth of it and apply it personally. Everyone is comfortable with the doctrine of grace, so long as it stays on the pages of the Bible...where it can't mess with their actual beliefs.  Where it can't challenge their self sufficiency.

But Christ is all about incarnation. Those who preach the gospel must be incarnational about the truth of it. Let it invade.

These thoughts have totally transformed my experience of Advent for about four years now. Oh, my soul waits for Him, and in His word I do hope!