Five Signed Prints

We are turning the little downstairs bedroom (which two sons have inhabited, in addition to various live-ins, my brother-in-law’s gardener—a long story—and boyfriends of one granddaughter). This space also served as my “fabric studio,” which had been set up with a sewing table, a sewing machine, a fabric art library, and an upholstered chair to settle into for comfortable hand-hemming or mending.

The rough cut siding of the room had been stained a rich wine color, the cement floor covered with red concrete paint and the long wall, which held cutouts where fish tanks once perched, had been almost covered with five signed prints given to me by a student artist when David and I were pastoring Circle Church in the heart of the inner city of Chicago. They are a little rough and unformed in their artistry, but I love them—mostly because they illustrate, from small to large, the cry of the human heart for a God to embrace, receive, overtake, and infill it. The artist, Charis Hathaway, titled the prints “Spirit Power.” But, a granddaughter, about three years of age, named them “Hep me! Hep me!” I think I like the little child’s nomenclature best.

The reason these prints move me is that at that time in my life, I was hungry for a work of the Holy Spirit that would embrace, receive, overtake, and fill me. This was during a national cycle of argument over the theological role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of humankind. There was a moving of power and miracle-working authority happening in many places in the world deemed the charismatic movement. I, a child of Baptist, fundamentalist background, knew next to nothing about the Holy Spirit, either theologically or experientially. The prints remind me of that hunger—something given to me that came from outside of my capabilities or design. The eventual climax of the art—the last print and the largest—beautifully conveys to me the desire and the satisfaction of that desire that God worked in my life during those years.

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