The Only Safe Place for Your Middling Heart {The Conclusion of our 31 Days - and a GIVEAWAY}

Here we are.  The very last day of this 31 days of October.  Your messages and emails and comments have meant the world to me.  They have been encouraging.

And heart-breaking.

And incredibly encouraging.

And wrenching.

And wildly funny.

I feel like we've gotten to know each other, and I don't want it to end.  A new reader wrote me a private message a few days ago saying, "So, after 31 days, what next?"

The question has haunted me since.  Not in a creepy-Halloween sort of way, but in a sweet, urgent, compelling way.  Though making art is nice  absolutely incredible, and designing jewelry and bags (and someday my own "In the Middle" clothing line) is truly fun for me...

...it is still all about The Message, for this girl.  No, not the translation of the Bible by Eugene Petersen, but the Gospel message.  A few of you have written to me saying that the Gospel means so much more to you, that it applies to you in ways you didn't realize before.

This is what I was created to do.  Thank you for giving me the chance to do it.  When I sit here and pour my heart out through my fingers and into these containers called "words"...I know I am living my purpose.  No art, no business, no mission, no venture of any kind can be allowed to compete with the priorities of local church life  and the Gospel we so faithfully declare and represent together as one body of believers.

The grace of God made me come alive as a six year old little girl who was the only one to answer an altar call in a tiny Presbyterian church.  Then, grace made me come alive again as a stuck-in-the-middle, middle aged woman.  And it continues to be what makes me come alive, every time I stop to consider how complete I am in Christ, and how completely loved.

I wake up, each day, with my hair on fire.  I am burning to see you do - not what you wish you were gifted to do - I want to see you do what you are actually gifted to do.  I want you to know how it is exactly that you bless your world.  Already.

Whether cooking or dancing or singing or working with kids or being a great networker - your people skills or your computer skills or your organizational/administrative skills - whether fine art or the fine art of loving others - you bless the world in certain, specific ways.

Remember:  not how you wish you could bless others, but the way you actually do bless them already.  All the things you do that you take for granted, because they aren't that hard for you to do.  Capitalize on those things, and immerse yourself in them, and go from good to very good.  In the area you are gifted, I want you every week to do one hard thing that grows your gift, one easy thing to practice your gift, and one thing for someone else, in order to give your gift away.  Every day, plan for these things.  Ask yourself, "Where can I create beauty?" and "Who can I love better today?"

I want you to stare straight at who you really are, and respect what you really see.

You are made in His image.  When you liberate who you are, when you decide to daily declare His greatness through your distinctive gifts, when you let yourself do what makes you come alive, we will see Jesus, because we  finally get to see who He is in you.

Most women forget that in order to die to self, there has to be a "self" to begin with.  As Christians, we are so busy being Martha, so busy dying to ourselves, we never take the time to come alive to ourselves as image-bearers.  Dear one, you are meant to reflect the image of God.

Beloved, He is beautiful.

If, in the words of the apostle Paul, "I die daily", then that means I am also resurrected daily.   I experience new life daily, because in Christ, death never has the final say.  There is always resurrection after death.  So let's stop playing the "die to self" card, and start coming alive in Christ, shall we?  Unnecessary martyrdom is so unattractive.

Becoming fully alive isn't the end, and it isn't even the means to the end.  Being fully alive in our gifts is proof of the Christ-life...it is confirmation of the new creature.  It verifies the accuracy of our claim to the 'yes and amen' found only in Christ.

The most difficult aspect of mid-life, is reconciling the ideal with the real.  In fighting to keep a vision of our ideal life alive, we end up making a whole lot of bad decisions, and spouses and children and best friends and churches end up being casualties in our hot pursuit of what we wish we could be.

Never let your vision of the greater glory of Christ be obscured by the lesser glory of the law, or your desire for financial success, or your desire for a Godly family, or to be self sufficient, or to "eat cleanly"or any other competing glory.

Having your whole mind renewed and lit from within with the glory of grace can get you up in the morning and give you a reason to take joy.

Every other dream and desire will fail you, no matter how worthy or how noble.   And it is never too late to put Christ absolutely, unquestioningly first in your life.  It is never too late to discover grace.

Grace is the only safe place for your middling heart.

“Belatedly I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved thee. 
For see, thou wast within and I was without, and I sought thee out there. 
Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things thou hast made. 
Thou wast with me, but I was not with thee. 
These things kept me far from thee; even though they were not at all unless they were in thee. 
Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open my deafness. 
Thou didst gleam and shine, and didst chase away my blindness. 
Thou didst breathe fragrant odors and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for thee. 
I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. 
Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace.” 

~Augustine


 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As a thank you for spending your 31 days with me, I am offering a giveaway, just in time for Christmas!

If you leave a comment you will be entered.  If you Facebook or Pinterest or Tweet this post, please leave another comment and I will enter you again.  If you blog about it, I will enter you yet again.  Just be sure to let me know!  You will receive:

Every print from Sheila Atchley Designs featured in this {31 Days of Celebrating Middle Age}!
Every book featured, in the whole {31 Days} project!
One piece of jewelry, your choice, from my shop!
One free spot in the online class entitled "Let's Play Dress Up" taught by Paige Knudsen!

This giveaway has a value of several hundred dollars...I hope you win!

*Please note:  I am not "sponsored".  No one donates prizes for me to give away.  I am not Pioneer Woman.  (Love her!) My blog is not monetized.  These gifts come from my own pocket.  Why?   Because yes, I am working hard to build an online platform -  I am that consumed with a desire to share Christ through words and art.  Please do share this blog with others, via email or Facebook or Pinterest.  It is my prayer that I honor that trust by being an encouragement to every person you send my direction.

Drawing will be held on Friday, November 8th.  Prizes will be shipped via my studio and Amazon soon thereafter.

Stuck In The Middle With You {My Story}

There was a time when I thought I was above any kind of crisis...much less a "mid-life crisis".

I hadn't yet learned that a mid-life crisis isn't about how old I am.  It has everything to do with how I handle dropping my plates.

A mid-life crisis has far less (almost nothing) to do with age, and far more to do with the fact that so very many, many people are aptly able to keep a whole lot of plates spinning for a whole lot of years...

...but no human being can keep that up indefinitely.  We just so happen to be about 45 or 50 when the breakage begins, because plates have an average life-spin-span of about 20-25 adult years.  Then a plate falls.  And it is a cherished and heirloom plate that ends up crashing, always.  And then the other plates just tend to start falling by themselves when...

...a child fails...
...a child succeeds...then leaves...
...you get "that" diagnosis...
...a parent dies...
...a church splits...
...a dream dies...
...a husband is unfaithful...
...there is an ongoing health issue...
...we discover we no longer love being plate spinners.

The true-truth is that this sort of mess and calamity is no respecter of age or gender or socio-economic status.  I know an eighteen year old who is dealing with crippling regret.  Is this person having a teenage crisis?  I know a seventy-something person who is wildly unhappy.  Are they having a geriatric crisis?

Of course not.  "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards", it says in the book of Job.

And so my plates started hitting the concrete almost the day I turned 40.  Seriously, I turned 40, and the next day I had to buy readers, and the day after that all hell broke loose.

I found myself wanting to fall asleep and never...as in, never-ever...wake up.  I didn't think of ways I could end my life.  I just didn't want to wake up to my life.  I was camped out at what professionals will tell you is the lesser manifestation of suicidal depression.  I didn't feel this way for days...or weeks...or even months.  The months turned into a year, and then it all kept going.  Longer.  Longer still.

Healing began when I heard the Lord say to me, "When you wake up in the morning, I want you to do whatever you want to do.  Do whatever brings you joy."

This was a gut-wrenching challenge, because I was still home educating my youngest.  And he was barely on speaking terms with fractions and percents when he should have been best friends with Algebra II.  I was an epic fail, in my own estimation.  (Nevermind that our youngest had what we now know was bona-fide ADHD with some XYZ thrown in just to make things interesting.  End of story:  he learned Algebra, and graduated with a respectable enough ACT score to get into college, and has done so...three times, by my last count...)

To make a long litany short, I found myself in a place I had never been.  A place where I cried daily and violently.  A place where I didn't want to wake up, which really means I didn't want to live.

I would run a hot bath and crawl into my tub in the wee hours of the morning to weep and pray and hope that my legs would stop wanting to kick and squirm.

I lived every.single.day. with a burning sensation in the pit of my stomach, with no appetite.  I also had inexplicable urges to rock back and forth sometimes (I suppressed them) and developed a weird sensitivity to handling certain fabric - folding my laundry was a misery.

Then...in the middle of all that...two daughters married in the space of one year (such joy...and stress!), but then my sons turned into quasi-prodigals.  I call them "quasi-prodigals" because my sons would never deny the faith, in fact they still defend and share the Gospel, if you can imagine that.  But they weren't - and aren't - living for Christ at all.

Life.  Became.  Very.  Hard.

And you know what?  There is more.  But I will stop right there.  Because it bothers me to this very day to talk about that dark season.  I would be a fool not to hate it like I would hate any other destroyer.  May even the memories rest in peace.

Suffice it to say, I have overcome overwhelming odds to be sitting here right now, this minute - not to mention laughing and mentoring and grandmothering and speaking and writing and making art and running a creative small business.

So who the heck cares if I say a replacement word occasionally, or that I like country music on days, or that I don't recycle like I should, or check my food for GMO's, or that I eat junk food on Tuesdays?  For heaven's sake, I am here and I am blessed and I know I am fully loved!

You have to pick your battles, honey, and let me pick mine.  I might go back to rabid self improvement later in life, but for now, I am a full-on Sola Gracia Girl.

By.  Grace.  Alone.

I'm juuuust happy to be here.

And happy to wake up, every single day.

It was nothing short of a radical message of grace that could crush my bondage.

Me.  Who never thought I would ever know what slavery felt like.

Ta-Dah'ing In the Middle {31 Days of Celebrating Middle Age}

Ps 92:12 The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God.

Flour - ish: 1. To grow luxuriantly: THRIVE. 2. To fare well: PROSPER 3. To be in one's prime.4. To make bold, sweeping movements.

I think I might pull back at the idea of a truly flourishing God. Somehow, I grew up with the vague idea that God is a Yankee, who stoically makes do with what He has got in this narrow earth, and grudgingly uses the lives of sinful people to accomplish things He could have done better had He done it Himself, alone.

I cannot contain the image of God as one who plants new universes, and they branch out in all directions, twining their way through outer space like squash plants, or like the morning glory in my garden. They keep growing. There is no "first frost" to stop them.

My sensibilities balk at a God who would not allow His people to thriftily collect and store more manna than they needed for that day. Why not store some for tomorrow? Wouldn't that mean He didn't have to make as much for them all the next morning? And those twelve baskets of leftovers, after He fed the five thousand...where did I get away with the idea that God saran-wrapped it all, and trotted around the desert with it, just in case anyone else in the crowd got hungry again? "Here - have a half-eaten fish head...ah, and here's a bit of bread. This should tide you over until we get to Martha's house."

Sin-limited brains slow at the image of a God who poofs New Universes into existence, "just because", or who demands that we, flour-less and hot and grumpy, eat fresh bread every morning, or a God who saves the best wine for last. A flourishing God, whose people can be a flourishing people, if they'd but abide in His house.

And what of those "bold, sweeping movements"? Mymymy, if we didn't stop short of an abundant, bread-and-wine-making God, we screech to a halt at His waving His arms in any sort of dramatic gesture. Our thoughts of God are more....decent. Down-to-earth. Dignified. A "flourish" sounds too much like a "Ta-DA!"

God may very well wish me prosperity and all, but I am sure He would definitely not have me ta-da'ing about. Would He? Sounds a bit childish.

Ps 92:14 They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing...

Something tells me that ta-da'ing my way past middle age, and into old age, has nothing to do with a larger dress size or a red hat. Thank God.

Take Joy in the Middle {31 Days of Celebrating Middle Age}

I want to be a writer of joy. 

I dream of crafting phrases that sit and smile at you, or leap off the page, grab you by the neck, and yank a grin out of you. Forcibly. I see too many blogs that angst. Angst can be exquisite once in awhile, especially when accompanied by the perfect music and evocative photography. Angst is poetic. I plan on angsting here on this blog once in awhile, just because, like a good sneeze, it's then out of my system, and I can go back to laughing. Who wants to live life in a perpetual sneeze?

However poetic it can write, who wants angst, just so she can be an "Ar-teest" ? I contend that, in our sophisticated modern culture, it is joy that has become prosaic. It is easier to write something that makes everyone cry. I've met people who are too torqued up to dance. Too educated to relax and say something silly. Too busy dying to their flesh, to live - seated in heavenly places in Christ.

My husband and I used to tool around the Smokies, some years ago, in Tim's old Geo Tracker - the famous "Barbie Jeep". Oh, how we miss that car!


What? You've never seen a pastor, with a ballcap on his head, a huge grin on his face, driving a red matchbox "jeep", with a teacup poodle in his lap? It was a sight not to be missed. There's no angst in that man - and he has as much to angst over as anyone else.

The car was old, it had a few rust spots, and yeah...if you sat in the back, you got a whiff of exhaust now and then. ::cough:: But we loved that car. You've never seen anything more unpretentious in your life. It was a joyful little car.


If you were to look at that red Tracker, you would not have thought in terms of great hymns of the faith, or heard classical music in your head. But were you to look up! Look out!   If you ever saw, suddenly, the way a breathtaking vista could unfold right before you...

...you would have hummed a few lines of a great old hymn.  Anyone with a poetic soul can be taken to mountaintop experiences, transported by a little prosaic joy. Looking up and out and beyond is the key. So is refusing to pay attention to what angsts you.


One day in the mountains, taking in all that beauty, someone yelled, "I cannot believe you can do this for FREE!"


Yes, there is a God, and He gives us fun things for free. It's just that we have a hard time conceiving of that sort of God. John Piper calls Him the Happy God. I bet you might have missed five fun free things just yesterday - were you too busy poetically angsting? We are too hung up on our own sanctification to cut loose and live like people who are complete in Him. Angst feels more spiritual than a spit-giggle...(you know - when you giggle so effortlessly, you spit all over the guy next to you)


I think laughter is "carbonated holiness".


We are convinced that the cave of Adullam (a low point in the Old Testament King David's life) was more pivotal, more formative in the life of King David than that near-naked dance of his. We feel more spiritual in Gideon's winepress, asking angsting, deeply theological questions, than simply crawling out of the winepress, strapping on our sword, finding our enemy and promptly sticking our tongue out at him. (That always gets the fight going...)


Please overlook me, these days, if you find me wahoo'ing or convulsed in a spit-giggle. I've been through some stuff of my own, hard stuff, and so I just wanna sing victory songs. I want to take joy. I want to write joy. I want to ooze joy. No joy, no strength. Know joy, know strength.


I need to be strong, right now. The middle is hard.  Yet, as a new friend of mine reminded me, the middle is exactly where we hit our stride!  I am ready to hit my stride, here mid-race.  I need to be inspired.  So no sad spiritual songs, no beautifully poetic angst, no hurling myself down, emotionally speaking, just to find out if those angels really will bear me up.


Having done all to stand, I am going to stand...dancing in my spot, armor clinking, helmet bobbing, gospel-shod feet sliding through the gravels in a little moon-walk, sword flourishing ....uh-huh...oh yeah...because I know the end of this thing. I win.


A little prosaic joy = insurance that I will live to fight another day.

Grace in the Middle {31 Days of Celebrating Middle Age}

Your middle is as ordained a season in your life as your beginning was, and as ordained as the day of your end.  God births your beginnings, and He sets the time of your completions.  But He sings over your middle!

"The Lord thy God in your middle is mighty;  He will save, He will rejoice over you with joy;  He will rest in His love, He will joy over you with singing!"  (Zephaniah 3:17)

How can He do that?  How can He sing over our middle?  Has He looked at your middle lately?  Has He noticed mine?  (It's a mess...)

Here's how:  He is confident in His great love for you.  He rests in it.

It reminds me of my teacup poodle Rambo.  Bear with me, I promise this will make sense, maybe.

I've heard some incredible Bible teachers and preachers in my short time on this planet. I've heard them use majestic metaphor and substantive simile. I love the depth that has been illustrated for me, time and again, by solid thinkers in The Faith - some are well-known, some, like my own husband, little-known.

Try as I may, my mind won't work majestically. I sigh and I try, and therein lies the problem.

When I tune into my life as it really is, in all its quotidian acedia (oh, do look the words up - they are delicious to say, but bitter to live) the revelation of grace can come honestly. Like the revelations to be found in puppies and cookies.

It is no secret that I adore my puppy. He is a teacup poodle named Rambo, and he is aptly named.

In fact, my puppy sometimes acts appallingly, and I still smile. I delight in this little dog no matter what.



A few years ago, I examined this anomaly. You see, I was known, back then,  to be ever-working to improve myself, and therefore took unbridled delight in almost nothing. But I took disturbing delight in my poodle...everyone found it disturbing, because his misbehavior had almost no affect on me whatsoever.

I decided this was because I had no fear for this animal's future. God bless all those who believe that puppies have eternal souls: I do not. Therefore, no amount of spoiling on my part will send Rambo's soul to the Lake of Fire. This dog is "eternally secure".

 In a sense, His future is fully known to me: he will live in the lap of luxury and love, and one day die. That will be that (and yes, I will grieve terribly). Nothing in terms of Rambo's ultimate eternal destiny is up in the air. He can't misbehave his way into Canine Judgement. He can't bite hard enough to hurt a toddler.

I am utterly free to delight in my dog.

When I stop to consider these majestic metaphors, I realize: the Lord delights in me! He knows the plans He has for me. He has forever settled my ultimate destiny. (Yes, only because I have trusted Him for my righteousness!)

No amount of "misbehavior" on my part can shake Him from His great love for me, in Christ Jesus. Far from being antinomianism, (and unlike Rambo) this kind of good news actually makes me want to heel - to follow close by my Owner's side forever.

Poodles and antinomianism and eternal security aside (after all, a mind can only take so much splendor) I also sometimes wonder why baking cookies for grown-up kids isn't so much fun anymore.

Used to be, a batch of cookies was a day-maker. Making a couple of sheets of home made chocolate chip cookies had the potential to bring inner healing to four children who, on some days, were fraught with naughtiness and discord.

Ah, but now they are All Grown Up. They are adults, all of them, with jobs and net spendable income. Two of them are married, with babies of their own.  They can buy these treats for themselves, anytime they want. They can work for them.  Cookies from mom don't mean what they used to.  Now, they are just a nice gesture.

As it is with the free Gift of Grace. It is precisely when we think we have matured our way "past" it, that the gift begins to lose its luster. The fun is taken right out of living in it. The truth that used to make our day and heal our hurts, now is something we can earn for ourselves. And we "get blessed" for our efforts.


Well.  Whatever we can earn for ourselves must be pretty common and obtainable. Thus, when God offers grace to us, His grace is reduced (in our minds) to merely The Nice Gesture.

A Nice Gesture is entirely unable to change us.

Hear me - hear me well! Don't rob God (and yourself) of the delight and fragrance that should characterize piping hot, fresh-from-the-heart-of-God, sweet grace. You will never be able to work for it, you cannot obtain it on your own, all ideas of any righteousness of your own are a dangerous illusion.

This is where the metaphor breaks down, as it isn't a dangerous illusion at all for my children to buy their own cookies. See why I sigh? My metaphors aren't majestic enough.

Oh well. It is what it is. Puppies and cookies and grace.

LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me...

Make a Memorial {In the Middle}

So here you are, slap-dab between the former glory and the conclusion.  Here in this middling place, there is none of the momentum that always comes with new beginnings, yet the finish line is nowhere yet in sight.

What do you do?

Girl, you throw a party! 

Not even kidding.

Should we?  Is it worth the trouble it would take to pause while in full tilt, to stop long enough to care about the middle and to memorialize the miracle that we've made it this far?

Dang straight.

Go with me to Joshua chapter 4:

"And it came to pass, when all the people were clean passed over Jordan, that the Lord spoke to Joshua saying, 'Take you twelve men out of the people, out of every tribe a man, and command them saying, 'Take you out of the middle of the Jordan, out of the place where the priests' feet stood firm, twelve stones, and you shall carry them over with you, and leave them in the place where you shall lodge this night.'

And Joshua set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests which bare the ark of the covenant stood:  and they are there to this day."

Here, we see that God makes a big deal out of the middle.  In fact, Joshua was commanded to make two memorials:  one from the middle, and one in the middle. 

We absolutely must celebrate right where we are, and for no dang reason.  We must breathe in the atmosphere of eternity, and look at our weight, our debt, our career, our project, our place here in the middle, and let the peace of God settle over us like a blanket.

To be at peace is not to be passive or unempowered - and it certainly is not to be ashamed!

In every place you find yourself, right here in your middle, you can be at peace.  You can know that it is okay for you to be there.  After all, you are where you're at.

And to acknowledge where you are in the middle of your Jordan, and find joy in that place is to find strength.  And to find strength is to find yourself on the other side of your Jordan before you expected!

To be in denial about the difficulties  inherent to the middle, is to leave behind the very stones necessary to build your memorial.

The quality of your outcome depends on the strength and work you put into your middle.  It is  urgent  that you celebrate your middle.

Bring out the Near-Beer and the bubblegum cigars, and I request the very highest of fives.

Get it, girl!

Your Identity {In the Middle}

Everyone has read the quote by Mother Theresa, "The Lord has not called me to be successful, He has called me to be faithful."

And we nod our head in agreement...until middle age hits full-force, and in some area of our lives, lo and behold! it doesn't all pan out.  Success eludes us.  The outcome is not what we were gunning for.  

Then, we wonder what went wrong, what did we do wrong, and where is God in all this? Dark discouragement threatens our spiritual health, as we examine every aspect of our existence, searching for solutions to this problem - for an explanation for this unexpected turn of events.

After all, if we do our part, isn't God obligated to do His? Underneath all the Christian-speak about trusting in God, isn't life a pretty predictable series of acts of obedience, followed by the goal of midlife good results? Sure, we may encounter temporary set-backs, even a catastrophe here and there, but shouldn't the end result turn out to be the one for which we aim? What is trusting in God for, if not to grant success to us when we are obedient to Him?

To put it succinctly: No.

Trusting in the Lord pleases Him. Pleasing Him is the goal. The goal, ultimately, is simply to hear, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

It is hard to stare perceived failure in the eye. It can be devastating to look back on years of work, even decades of obedience to God, with little to show for it, to the eyes of watching men.

But I have a word for you, wherever you are. Whether you have been faithful in the ministry, only to see hardship - or worked your heart out for years in your own business, only to see it go under - whether you have been honest and upright in a relationship, only to be mistreated, or circumspect with your finances, only to see hard times; whether you have been obedient to raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, only for them to demand all you had to give, and leave you and your God - whether you have diligently poured out your best years to your local church, only to be betrayed....what if I told you that your obedience-for-the-sake-of-obedience is beautiful in the eyes of the Lord? What if God Himself told you that?

He has already told you, when He told Isaiah. Listen to Isaiah's broken heart:

Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain... (Is. 49:4)

"All this work, for nothing. I've exhausted myself to no avail. Decades of faithfully prophesying the word of the Lord - and no revival. No results."

...yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my reward with my God.

Here comes the best part, the healing part ~

And now, saith the LORD that formed me from the womb to be his servant...Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the LORD, and my God shall be my strength.

This is my hard-won word for you.  Your outcome is the Lords ("yet surely my judgment is with the Lord...") and you are yet glorious in the eyes of the Lord. 

And thus saith the Lord to you. "Yet." Oh, yet! Not just "yet", but "yet surely." Yet surely as He knows your name, you are beautiful in the eyes of your Father, and He promises to strengthen you.

Life is not a predictable series of acts of obedience followed by sure and timely and perfect results. Sometimes, we do all we know to do, and "Israel is not gathered".

Cry your tears, beloved, and then dry them, because outward success was never to be your goal.

Your goal is to be glorious...honourable...distinguished...important and successful in the eyes of the Lord.

And yet you shall be.