Middle Marriage, Moonlight, and Fireflies

It’s that time of year again. The East Tennessee air becomes something this southern woman wears, and the field flowers frame all the roads where we live - urban, suburban or rural, no matter. Whether country lane or four lane, or daunting interstate rife with eighteen wheelers, the grassy hedges to each side of the various pavements are laden with stems of swaying, nodding color.

In between finishing my upcoming online art course, writing for a couple of magazines, and trips back and forth to church, I’ve managed to squeeze in daily walks in what we affectionately call “Mimi’s Meadow”. Only yesterday, being a Sunday and all, what has normally been a first thing in the morning thing, became a last thing before sunset thing.

And I couldn’t have been more pleased.

Middle Marriage, Moonlight, and Fireflies

Oh, it’s just a minute and forty-some-odd seconds of nothing, but it is less than two minutes of everything.

The sun rose early yesterday, with just a few clouds in sight. The Preacher donned his helmet, and fired up his pretend Vespa (a vintage Honda Elite), heading out to preach, with me following a half hour behind him in the huge white Ford truck. I couldn’t help but think, as I gripped the steering wheel, hugging my side of the narrow two lane highway to Harvest Church, about how that we are less than ten days away from summer, and our Appalachian Spring seems to have gone by in a blur of breezes, and rainy afternoons and bright moments. After two years of “Pandemic Pastoring”, we are looking ahead into the next season with sweet anticipation.

And we’ve grown ever more mindful of the fact of our embodied faith, together. This has been a long, breaking two years, for so many bodies. Some bodies still endure the effects of “long Covid”….some bodies are gone altogether, their spirits forever with the Lord.

As a result, things like the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandkids, the soft downy feathers of our daughter’s four urban culdesac baby ducks, and the smell of garlic from the gardens have become Remarkable Events.

No, but really. We remark upon them, we reflect upon them, we discuss them all, we openly and vulnerably savor the aching beauty of being alive by tasting each others’ words, as we walk and sweat and sweat and walk.

Usually, these conversations are followed by a fast drive home, by cleaning our bodies up, and a full day.

But yesterday was a Sunday. Did I tell you that, already?

Since it was The Lord’s Day, we went at it with an instinctively gentler pace. The skies were twilight pastel, the trees in blue hour silhouette, and we inhaled the soft fragrance of nightfall in a meadow full of green grass and wildflowers. A few eager birds who were still awake sung to us with soothing tunes.

It’s all worth remembering. And so I write it down.

Beware {...A Bit of Oswald Chambers For Your Tuesday...}

Beware of isolation; beware of the idea that you have to develop a holy life alone. It is impossible to develop a holy life alone;

you will develop into an oddity and a peculiarism, into something utterly unlike what God wants you to be.

The only way to develop spiritually is to go into the society of God’s own children, and you will soon find how God alters your set.

God does not contradict our social instincts; He alters them.

My Utmost for His Highest - Oswald Chambers

Sunday, Sunday - I have so many reasons to love you. There are other days and other ways I can (and do) gather with the body of Christ, but thanks to Revelations 1:10, we know that Sunday has been special since the new covenant began.

“I was in the Spirit on The Lord’s Day…” ~the apostle John the Beloved

It isn’t “being religious” to gather on Sunday, any more than it would be being religious to buy my husband a gift on his birthday, or eat tacos on Tuesdays.

Nothing has blessed my life and fueled my creativity and challenged my selfish ways half as much as being an integral part of a local church.

Jesus = embodied God. The God who came to be face to face with. If Jesus could set aside heaven and come be with humans, I can set aside my petty offenses, my agendas, my busy-ness, and two hours on a Sunday. I’m not too mature for it.

And so, with all its supposed institutional imperfections (I see them, too) the whole point is to become an embodied expression of the Kingdom of God in the earth.

However imperfectly.

The very act of walking up the wide stairs of Harvest Church is a rebellion against plugged-in virtual culture. It removes me from false urgencies and puts the Beautiful Triune God front and center.

I get to live beyond timescale and to-dos and even my own efforts to remain relevant - to join a timeless culture of heaven, where all is NOW, and the lamb of God is worthy, and the bride of Jesus exists in reality, in a glory that shines like the stars.

Oh, for sure. When you take your imagination of faith to church with you, this is every bit what the embodied act of gathering and worship feels like…and in fact, is.

As an artist, I don’t see any other way to go to church, but with a faith imagination! I get to call things that be not as though they were, and for me it becomes so.

Things become for me, according to my faith.

I get to gather with a bunch of people who aren’t a bit like me, I get to do my worship - like the King is risen, dancing in my 55 year old body like I am “not drunk…as ye suppose”, praying for the saints of God like Jesus hears me.

I could wish no greater wealth for anyone.