Category Archives: Blather

Ten Atlanta Features I’m Going to Miss

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On December 31st a United moving van will pull into Dunnington Circle and stop at our driveway. By the time the New Year’s ball drops in Times Square later that night, the contents of our house will be on their way to a holding facility somewhere in North Carolina (at some point Tim and I should probably ask where, exactly, in NC), where they will remain for the next four to six months while we get to know our new home city of Washington, D.C. It just feels so right to me that our new adventure should begin on the very first day of a brand new year. I love new beginnings!

As we prepare to take our leave of this great Southern city, here are ten Atlanta features that I’m definitely going to miss:

1. First Baptist Church of Decatur  10854234_10102121348068353_5122813251598199324_o
I love this gifted, welcoming, risk-taking, gospel-focused, Christ-embodying congregation more than I know how to express. It was an honor to walk alongside them for eight years.

2. Living Near Mom IMG_1482
For twenty-five years, my mother and I lived between 1,100 and 3,000 miles from each other. In 2008 she moved from her long-time home in Orlando to a sweet little house just two miles from our place in Atlanta. Having her nearby has been such a treat. Mom volunteered in our church office, tutored Lucy in middle-school, provided transportation for Taylor, showed up at our door with countless home cooked meals and dog-sat for the dear departed Willie Boy. Mostly, it’s just been a comfort having the wonderful Barbara Pennington in my life on a daily basis. Pray for my mama who is embarking on an adventure of her own as she prepares to move back to her old stomping grounds in Florida.

3. The DeKalb Farmers Market dekalb-2
Got a hankering for the taste of dirty gym socks? Look no further than the DFM for a Durian fruit. Or maybe a Horned Melon, Mexican Pitaya or Buddha’s Hand. Don’t panic, they also sell broccoli and bananas. But it’s the exotic stuff that sets them apart—that, and the global community working and shopping there. On my first visit, back in 2007, I stood in the check-out line behind an ancient black woman with tattooed arms and long braids down her back, wearing a Bob Marley t-shirt and reading Jean-Paul Sartre. I knew I’d be coming back.

4. Stone Mountain Version 2
Climbing Stone Mountain expands my soul and kicks my tail—every. single. time. (Read here about my experience of climbing the mountain 50 times in 2010.)

5. Community Q BBQ Mac & Cheese IMG_4002
Mouth-watering, diet-busting heaven on a plate.

6. Wild Oats & Billy GoatsIMG_2675
An eclectic little folk art gallery across from Decatur Square became my guilty pleasure while I served at First Baptist. Whenever I needed a break from the office I’d spend 20 minutes rummaging around Wild Oats & Billy Goats, feeling completely restored afterwards. Tim gave me this cow for Christmas in 2014, painted by Sandy Erickson Wright. I’ve dubbed it “the face of kindness”.

7. The City of Decatur showdocument
“Mayberry meets Berkeley” sums it up perfectly. I’ve loved being surrounded by this progressive, compassionate, mishmash of humans.

8. My Clergy Peer Groups IMG_0218
I’ve been part of two groups. My interfaith clergy peer group met mostly on the picket line. We rallied together around issues of gun violence, Medicaid expansion, living wages for migrant farm workers and religious liberty. These rabbis, imams, priests and pastors inspired me more than they can possibly know.

My Baptist pastor peer group met every month at McAfee School of Theology. We mostly held the ropes for one another and prayed each other through the ups and downs of church life. Once, during a particularly difficult time at my own church, my peer group delivered to my office a bottle of bourbon named for the 17th century Baptist preacher Reverend Elijah Craig. I can report that Rev. Craig ministered faithfully to Tim and me for several months.

9. Siggers Hairdressers Version 2
I have thin, limp, potato-colored hair. Chad Siggers makes it appear less so. Gracias, Chad.

10. Black Bear Mountain Slippers and coffee in the Georgia mountains
Okay, this one’s not in Atlanta. But this mountain retreat just two hours north of the ATL has been a sacred place for Tim and me for six years—thanks to our dear, generous friends, Chuck and Bob.

Thanks for the memories, Atlanta! We’re glad to have known you. Grace and peace, y’all…

Better Than Normal

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Well, my lovely three-month sabbatical is winding down. A pastor friend told me that he’s never more depressed than at the end of a sabbatical. When you’re on sabbatical, he said, you come to realize that a pastor’s life isn’t normal. When you have a chance to taste “normal”, it’s hard to go back to “crazy”.

I know something of what he’s talking about. Still, my sabbatical is having a different effect on me. Having tasted “normal” (or as normal as life in the P-R house is ever gonna get) for nearly twelve weeks, I’m coming back inspired and eager to try some healthier practices, both at home and at church. More on that later.

This week I’ve been holed away at a mountain cabin, writing, writing. Mountain “cabin” is a bit of an understatement. More like a mountain mini-Biltmore. Undying thanks to two dear friends who opened their home to me.

Today I’m doing my best slug imitation, lazing in a rocking chair, soaking up the harmony of wind chimes and ogling the lavender carpet of mountains in the distance. Just off the deck is a bird feeder that seems to be a Circle K for every feathered creature inside a five-mile radius—warblers, plovers, thrushes, tanagers, buntings, chickadees. These birds of the air indeed do not sow or reap. But they do bully each other for Cole’s Special Blend around the feed trough. Here’s a 30-second clip:

My friend Brett Younger says that when you look up the word sabbatical in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of a pastor smiling. Yep, I’m smiling.

And so grateful.

First, to a good God who’s in the restoration business.

Second, to my dear, generous First Baptist Decatur family for giving me time and space to refill my saggy tires and to remember who I am, what the Church is about, and what we’re meant for.

Third, to our selfless staff who’ve covered lots and lots of extra bases all summer. I know, I know…I owe you big time.

And finally, to all the super-dee-duper preachers who’ve filled the pulpit each Sunday. Confession time: It’s a tiny bit possible that in some dank, reptilian corner of my soul, I secretly hoped that at least a few of you might stink a little, you know, for a comparative boost when I got back. You let me down, people.

Next Sunday I fly to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to wrap up my sabbatical, kayaking on Lake Superior with nine people I’ve never met. Back before Easter I saw an ad in the Christian Century for a retreat, sponsored by the Cedar Tree Institute, called “The Spirit of Place”. They had me at hello. We’ll kayak by day and talk about the writings of Flannery O’Conner around the campfire at night. Yes, I’m that lucky.

Two things you should know about the Michigan trip:
a) The ICE PACK on Lake Superior finally thawed just last month. Did I mention there’s been ICE?
b) I’ve never actually been in a kayak.

I’ll keep you posted.

Let It Be: 2014

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Snowy tree-lined road at sunrise.

Call them resolutions, aspirations, intentions, whatever. I pray that a year from now these will have been true of me in 2014:

1.  She lived in and led from the roominess of God.

“The Good Shepherd leads his sheep out of the tight and tiny boxes in which we lock ourselves into his spacious pastures.”
~ Timothy Radcliff

“All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said, has its origin in the Spirit.”
~ Thomas Aquinas

2. She wore her own face.

“Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces…”
~ May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”

“The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation… and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but their own vulnerable selves.”
~ Henri J. M. Nouwen

3. She was mindful of each moment.

“We spend a long time wishing we were elsewhere and otherwise.”
~ Robert Farrar Capon

“The present moment, like the spotted owl or the sea turtle, has become an endangered species. Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline.”
~ Philip Simmons

4. She practiced stillness.

“I learned…that inspiration…comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness…The imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
~ Brenda Ueland

5. She operated more often from love than from fear.

“Our fear is in the service of all the little ways we have learned to protect our false self. But love is really who we are. We’ll never see the love we really are, our foundation, if we keep living out of our false self of self-protection and overreaction. We must remember that ‘perfect love casts out all fear’ (1 John 4:18).”
~ Richard Rohr

6. She chose joy.

It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation…
~ Mary Oliver 

7.  She finished that dag-nabbity book!

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
~ Thomas Mann

Good and gracious God, let it be.

photo cc flickr.com/photos/18_2rosadik36

Theological Reflections on a Bulldog

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Willie as PuppyOur dear English Bulldog, Willie Boy, died last week. Hearts are still at half-mast around here.

Back in December of 2005, in a moment of temporary insanity, Tim and I decided to grant our daughter Lucy’s persistent and increasingly creative requests for a puppy. We approached the task of choosing a breed with painstaking precision.

Okay, in truth we Googled this dog. Plugged in the two most essential characteristics—“requires minimal exercise” and “excessively affectionate”—and voila (or as we say in the South: wah LA), all fingers pointed to the English Bulldog. (Our Google search for dogs born potty-trained came up empty.)

Willie lived up to his breed’s reputation. He was a furry love sponge whose idea of rigorous exercise was a trip to the mailbox. He fit in from the get-go.

And along the way Willie taught me some things about God. For one thing, God appreciates a good joke. Anyone who doubts God’s sense of humor has never met canis lupus bulldawgus. It’s my fixed belief that bulldogs got thought up at around 4:45 on Friday afternoon, when God was feeling a wee bit prankish.

And Willie was evidence that God uses all the crayons in the big box. In 1848 Cecil Frances Alexander of Dublin, Ireland, wrote some words that would become a best-loved children’s hymn: All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful: The Lord God made them all. 

Mrs. Alexander wrote the hymn to help children better understand the opening words of the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

I can report that Willie Boy didn’t know the Apostles’ Creed from applesauce. He never once weighed in on the predestination debate, or invited anyone to consider the gospel, or lifted a paw to help address the problem of evil in the world.

And yet, as my heart lurches now for our jowly, gassy, ornery little guy with the undulant waddle and goofy underbite, I can’t help but marvel at our colorful Creator—who jolly well could have made all animals boringly alike, but who, for the sheer pleasure of it, gave us bulldogs and baboons, wart hogs and wallabies, poodles and panda bears. Yippee!

So here’s to you, Willie Boy—you hilarious reminder of God’s creative goodness. Sleep soft, old friend. You gave us joy.

Willie's jowls on floor

I Am From Unhurried Talkers

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Julie and her brother, 1964.I am from unhurried talkers and folktale weavers, from Sunday school-goers and jailhouse dwellers. I’m from Southern indirectness and civil religion, from Bless your heart and God’s on our side.

I am from wooden clothespins
and sheets smelling of sunshine.
I am from coal dust, home brew
and the company store.
From “be a sweet little girl”
and “that’s not ladylike.”

I am from Big Penn, Bahbra-Ann
and darling Brother.
From Grandpas that burned in the mine
and Grandma-That-Goes-To-Work.

I’m from the Air Force vagabond life,
the seven-schools-in-ten-years life.
From commissary groceries
and “Oh, say can you see” before the movie begins.

I’m from Little Golden Books and Green Eggs and Ham,
from the Itsy Bitsy Spider and Zacchaeus was a wee little man,
from Laura Ingalls Wilder and Trixie Belden by flashlight.

I’m from giving my life to Jesus during Mission Impossible.
I am from Mom’s sweet piety and Dad’s pack of smokes,
from John Three Sixteen and nickel slots at Tahoe.
I’m from hold-em-under baptisms and grape juice thimbles,
from lowbrow hymns and Evangelism Explosion.

I am from anxious and butterflies and nail-bitten hands.
From straight-A’s and can’t do pull-ups,
from “mentally gifted” and chubby thighs.

I’m from Goo Goos and Yoo Hoos and ice-cream-headaches.
From Vitameatavegamin and the Three Hour Tour.
From hot rollers and halter tops and green shag carpet.

And oh mama, I am from vinyl. From 33’s and 45’s
and a dime on the needle so it doesn’t skip. From Abby Road
and American Pie, from Doobies and Eagles and Carlos Santana.

I’m from the warm-bath ocean and the not-even-in-a-wetsuit ocean.
From Redneck Riviera and Giant Sequoias,
from orange blossoms and oleanders and Steinbeck’s vineyards.
From Louisiana lush and San Joaquin baked.

I am from open arms and waiting laps, from sugar baby,
sweetie pie and Love you before hanging up.

I’m from Give all of yourself you can to all of the Christ you know.
From Grace abounds 
and from God’s got your back.
From Death, where is your victory?
and The greatest of these is Love.

I am from all of this and acres more.
But today, as leaves come down and memories rise up
and the bulldog sighs under the table . . .
what I’m mostly from is Gratitude.

This is part of the SheLoves synchroblog “I Am From”.  
Jump in with your own story!