4 minute read
How y’all been doin’?
from July 2021
Gò0dNews for Everyone
How y’all been doin’?
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by Deck Cheatham
Throughout the year of Covid-19, I missed those four walls called church. You can imagine my delight when, taking respite up on the mountain, N. and I heard music coming from across the street at a church. Seeing everyone gathering outside, we were enjoined to mosey across the lawn and sit down. Welcomed by sunshine, leaves whisking on the breeze, and good conversation, a friendly usher crossed the street to say hello. We heard a good sermon and witnessed their ceremonial burning of the mortgage on a new Fellowship Center. Gathering together—even as a stranger—feels like home. I left fed and full.
Sensing I had entered a desert in my devotion time, stumbling into this church service was a needed tonic. My morning devotions had become a bit like week-old-bread—not worth eating and best thrown out for the pigeons. So, to change things up, instead of reading to feed others, I decided to be fed. If anxiety is a response to the unknown, God answered my prayer. Allow me to give thanks to Henri Nouwen for giving me four words used in communion—taken, blessed, broken and given—to help me understand that God’s children live in His belovedness.
As those words sank into my consciousness, this old southerner realized that God’s people are a gathering people. Without investigation, gathering may or may not have been invented by southerners. Honed, chiseled, sharpened—a southern gathering is so refined it is hard to tell the difference until you either hear, “how y’all been doin’,” “you may kiss the bride,” “let’s remember Bubba’s life,” or “Go Dawgs, Tigers, War Eagle, Roll Tide or wait until next year.” Sometimes you hear them all.
Southerners know that when the gathering is over, those good feelings felt by all come from the familial binding of a common table, of soil and seed and season, of name and ancestry. We know we have been fed by more than the fixins, Aunt Dot’s squeeze, the “Do you remember?” conversations, and the “Good to see y’all” goodbyes. Maybe that is why newcomers come away using the cliché— southern hospitality. To us, with all the ritual and dogma and warmth, gathering is church without the four walls and steeple. Sometimes, it is that too.
I am convinced that Covid-19 will pass. There will come a day when we say, “Do you remember the year...?” We will look back and be glad it is over. Gathering will again bind us in God’s belovedness and feed us with good feelings. Until then, Christians should know that God has the unknown in hand. We can go on loving our neighbors and God with all our strength. We can gather with God each morning and give thanks for answered prayers.
While Covid-19 demands me to give up gathering for now, I will not give up being a southerner anytime soon.
“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15).
About The Author Deck Cheatham has been a golf professional for some 40 years. He lives with his family in Dalton. He is a guest columnist for the Rome News Tribune, The Daily Citizen, and the Calhoun Times. Email him at pgadeacon@gmail.com.
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