Wordless (Almost) Wednesday

A picture (of more than a thousand words) is worth a thousand words....

Here is what my husband has to deal with, every time he wants to get into his side of the bed....poor guy. And he keeps me, in spite of it. He deserves a medal, for all the years of patience that being married to a bibliophile has required of him.

Dancing With God

For whatever reason, the baby showers I am invited to, almost always take place in the summer. Some years, there has been a veritable rash of summer baby showers. I used the word "rash" carefully, because for me, I enjoy all those little baby shower games about as much as I probably enjoyed diaper rash as an infant. Being the world's worst party...er..."pooper", I am the first to willingly give up my diaper pin, felicitously pinned to my best silk blouse by the mistress of ceremonies. Before I even find my seat, I look around the room and smilingly growl (yes, that is possible to do), "Babybabybaby. Go on, and take the stupid safety pin!"

Then, there usually follows an air of shock and awe, as very few can fathom not wanting desperately to win baby shower games.


There is the inevitable "guess which jar of baby food is what" game. I defy you to tell me the difference between an unlabeled jar of Gerber squash, and an unlabeled jar of peaches. Then, to top it all off, the Olympic Sport of all baby showers: the "guess the circumference of the pregnant mother's belly" games. I grudgingly pull at least three yards from the spool of ribbon, or - for the love of Pete - toilet paper. Happily, the time for opening gifts finally comes.


But somewhere between the diaper pin snatching and the unwrapping of that final gift, I notice "the look" in the expectant mother's eyes. I'd know that look anywhere. It is something akin to mist and awe and fear and an awakening love too powerful to hide. Far greater than a hormone (oh, that some of the extreme emotions relative to womanhood were not obtusely categorized as "hormonal"!) there broods in those eyes a glow of primal celebration. "Unto us a child is born" are words that thrill more than just a Bible reader, they burn in the heart of any woman who has yearned for a baby of her own. When the day arrives that she finds herself opening those gifts of tiny shoes and pajamas and fluffy blankets, something happens. Her heart lurches forward and skips a beat. Her hands may even tremble as they attempt to untie a frosty pink or blue ribbon. She gets "the look" in her eyes - the look that silently betrays her inner longing to hold this baby for the very first time.


Forget the games. They give me hives. I attend baby showers to see that look. I attend baby showers because babies are unspeakable miracles. I show up because babies become the children who dance with God.



Yes, dancing with God is inevitable for children. There will always come an afternoon or morning or night when the Spirit of the Living God "comes out to play", so to speak. That child will experience the presence of God, usually in the absence of the parents - alone on a bed, or outside looking at a flower. It is a very personal thing, quite experiential, and very different from mommy or daddy telling a child that God does, indeed, exist. While almost no one remembers that first awakening awareness of God, we each one were visited by Him in our childhood. We each one danced with God. I stole that phrase from Walter Wangerin, who poingantly describes this supernatural inevitability:



"Who can say when, in any child, the dance with God begins? No one. Not even the child can later look back and remember the beginning of it, because it is as natural an experience (as early and as universally received) as the child's relationship with the sun or with his bedroom. And the beginning, specifically, cannot be remembered because in the beginning there are no words for it. The language to name, contain, and to explain the experience comes afterward. The dance, then, the relationship with God, "faithing", begins in a mist.

..."Faithing", we may say, is not unique to a few people: it is at least initiated in all. It is a universal human experience. We all have danced one round with God. But we danced it in the mists."


Now that I think about it, that is the very mist I see in the eyes of the pregnant mother. How can it be anything but, with the very Spirit of God brooding over her belly? At some point, I believe the point of conception, that baby became a living soul, and the mother manifests the mists of "faithing" in her eyes as she awaits the arrival of this child, of whom the poets said, "Is fresh from God...from beholding the face of God." Pregnancy is when a woman gets to dance another round with her Creator. He takes her in His arms, gently leading her, and together they step and twirl, dip and sway within the mists of His hovering, life giving Spirit, and the mists of emotions too eternal to be put into mere words.

I believe He returns now and again to our lives, when we know Him, to dance. But never will the dance be quite so gentle and so miraculous as when He dances with a pregnant mother, and then a short time later, turns to dance with her child. This is why I try to never miss a baby shower.


But you can still have my diaper pin. I'm just not competitive when it comes to baby shower games.



The dreaded "Diaper the Grown Woman" competition...



"Expectant Sssssssuper Mommy!"

"It's all for Hannah Grace. We didn't eat a bite. Ahem."

....lotta, lotta estrogen in that room!

"AWWWWWWWWWWWW!"


The mommy (and wife-to-our-youth-pastor) Kelly Bailey, and I. Hannah Grace is yet "in the oven".

Do Mega Churches Prevent Christian Knowledge?

I'm not saying they do. I am not saying that those thousands-of-members churches prevent people from living an authentically Christian life. But GK Chesterton (one of my very favorite dead-guy-writers) would have thought that they do. Consider this quote from Heretics by G. K. Chesterton ~

"It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the willfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan.

But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.

A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge. "

So? Do you agree with Chesterton? You don't have to answer that out loud.

Wish List

If by saying that all men are born equal, you mean that they are equally born, it is true, but true in no other sense; birth, talent, labor, virtue, and providence, are forever making differences.

Resolved to live with all my might while I do live, and as I shall wish I had done ten thousand ages hence.

~both quotes by Johnathan Edwards

You haven't lived, until you've put a $250 book on your wish list. Actually, it is a set of TWO books...hard cover...classic...


Nevermind. Not everyone will understand.


No, I don't expect to actually receive this set of books, but to know they exist is exquisitely bittersweet.

This is the "blank Bible". It is the collection of a lifetime of thoughts on Old and New Testament Scripture, by Johnathan Edwards. The entire process, from concept to publication, is fascinating (well, to me) and you can learn about it here:





Enjoy the bittersweetness of adding this jewel to YOUR wish list! (Many thanks to my friend Dan Bowen, of "Life on Wings" for making me aware of it.)

Tangible Proofs of a Tangible God

Ps. 86:17 Shew me a token for good; that they which hate me may see it, and be ashamed: because thou, LORD, hast holpen me, and comforted me.

There have been days I have needed tangible proof. Thoughts are the intangible currency of my life, they are my art form, rather than concrete things such as houses or drawings or bread baking or paintings or my fingers touching an instrument, physically bringing forth a melody. As a writer I live in my head, out of my head, and from my head, and I am seemingly forever in deep thought. It is exhausting, sometimes.

And on rare occasions, my deepest thoughts and beliefs, even about God, are too abstract to satisfy even me. Even me....who normally finds a mere thought, when it is a new and a great one, to be completely enthralling. It is comforting to know that, when I am needy and worn out from believing in things my eyes cannot see, my God is perfectly willing to show me a token of His great love for me.

Proof. That is what that Hebrew word "token" means. The Bible is full of the mention of tokens from God's heart to man's weary spirit. The sun and the moon are tokens of His faithfulness. Proof. (Ge. 1:14) The rainbow is a token of His forever mercy. Proof. (Ge. 9: 12-17) The blood over the doorposts was a visual token, illustrating future redemption. Proof. (Ex. 12:13) Taking one day a week to rest and contemplate the things of God is meant to be something tangible, that anchors us - something we can return to, week in and week out, and discover God afresh. Proof - lived out every single week. If only we would. (Ex. 31:13, 17) Everything from a scarlet thread, to rocks in a river, to the fringe on a garment; they all were God-given tokens to humans who cannot dwell for very long in an abstract reality.

The incarnation is the Ultimate Token. Word became flesh and lived with us. Jesus said, after His resurrection, "Touch me. An intangible doesn't have flesh and bones like you see I have!"

Down through the corridors of time and eternity, those words find me. They find me where I am, flailing and trying-too-hard to believe in all the words I am reading, in all the true-truths that fill my brain. God invites me to touch Him and see for myself. No - He doesn't just invite me. He pulls me to His heart, takes me in His arms, and pulls from His bottomless pocket a token.


A house to live in.

A puppy to love.

A letter from a friend.

A breeze on a hot day.

I have a list of very personal and tangible proofs, as real and as visual as blood on doorposts, and the fringe on the garment of a priest. You should also have a list. If you don't have one, start one, today. My list is long. Many of the tokens on that list have come in answer to prayer, and I am encouraged and invited and commanded to pray for things I need. Yes, things! Things I can see, and things that others can look at, and see that God has, indeed, been very good to me.

Another list you should have is the list of tokens, for yourself and for others, that you do not yet possess. Some call it a "prayer list".

Justice is a thing. Bread is also a thing. Justice and bread are visible tokens to those that are given them, and a source of great pain to those who do without them. Those are our two examples, illustrated by Jesus, two objectives of insistent, incessant prayer. Bread for the body. Justice for the soul.

We can cry out for tangible proofs, to a tangible God.

He will show us a token for good.

Morning Has Broken ~

Here is what is new in the Atchley-late-summer garden...or, relatively new. Not to sound trite, but these are small harvests of pure pleasure to me:

Finally, after planting these by seed, months ago, the first blossom appears just this very morning...I had given up hope of this Morning Glory ever blooming. Isn't that how hoping in God is? The results, to quote Pilgrim's Progress, are always "longer than you wish, sooner than you think."

Candid shot (really!) of just a few of my Tools of the Trade...I snapped this just after planting some pots of rudbeckia this morning. Better to plant late, than to plant never! Hmmmmmm...isn't that also the way hoping in God is?

Apples, growing just alongside the stump of a plum tree. A plum that had to be cut down, years ago! A surprise blessing, from what seemed to us the sadness of long-ago storm damage.

My "reading girl" statue - through a mist of heirloom cherry tomato plants, whose harvest is, as of this week, full-force!

The last of the patio tomatoes. Not so "full-force" anymore.

Hand-made, "primitive" style tables, created by our retired neighbor, just for us, in our firepit outdoor "living room".

This week's newest sunflower! See the bee? (photo by Hannah Atchley)

Apples from "our" tree. Well...this tree is five steps away from the Atchley property line, and my retired neighbor Earl lovingly insists that we pick as much as we want, anytime we want. So yes. The tree is "mine". This harvest of apples is my harvest. A better batch of fried apples we never tasted! It so rocks to be me.

About a month ago, we wondered where our hummingbirds went. My husband, who loves to watch them, prayed out loud, in front of me, "Lord...please send our hummers back." Now, we have a Hummingbird Sighting every two minutes. Not even lying. They are everywhere, and fly disarmingly close to us, at all hours of the daytime. (photo by Hannah Atchley)

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Our Mammoth-variety (we are growing about four different kinds!) of sunflowers finally opened their faces two weeks ago. Here is one of them. (photo taken by Hannah Atchley)

The Boys of Summer...

Nobody on the road,nobody on the beach.

I feel it in the air,the summers out of reach

Empty lake, empty streets,the sun goes down alone.

I'm driving by your house, though I know that you're not home...

And I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun

You got your hair combed back, sunglasses on, baby

And I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong

After the boys of summer have gone.

Some things you can never have back. I used to complain (a little) about the full yard I seemed to have, every summer, for almost as long as I can remember. Our summers here at the Atchley House could have easily been entitled, "The Summers of Boys". Boys in the yard, boys in the trees, boys in the cul-de-sac, and the steady bounce-bounce-bounce of perpetual basketball games.

But school has started this year, already. And for the first time, I realized....this was it. This was the very last and final installment of the Boys of Summer.

For they are all becoming young men.

The tears flow, sudden and unexpected, like a summer storm, even as I sit here typing. My oldest boy has already faded away from the summer scene, having worked full time when school let out, for a couple of years now. Next summer, my youngest, I am sure, will be working full time - doubtlessly saving his money for the coveted Teenaged Ride.

I know. It is a different take, a different perspective on the classic Don Henley song. Lyrics and art can be pliable like that, sometimes. They can be re-interpreted. I won't hear the "Boys of Summer" in quite the same way, ever again. Summertime will never be the same, either. It will have to be re-sung and re-interpreted and re-invented...the lyrical beat of sunrise and sunset, and hot days, and no school, and popsicles will someday apply to future grandsons.

Freckled faces, dark tans, plastic sunglasses from the Dollar Store, water hoses full force, and all the shouting that somehow has changed from tenor into bass. It will vanish, and is vanishing before my eyes. I've never been one to be maudlin. I move from one season into the next rather seamlessly, compared to many. But oh, what I wouldn't give to be able to convince myself that the Boys of Summer - my boys - will still be out there in the sun, young and fresh faced and innocent....forever.

They will live on that way, in my heart. In that mother's heart of mine that aches, sometimes.

Oh yes. "I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong...after the boys of summer have gone..."