Welcome to WonderfullyMade

What does it mean to be wonderfully made? Psalm 139:14 says that each person is "fearfully and wonderfully made." It means I am fearfully and wonderfully made. What is so fearful and wonderful about the way God made me? I don't yet fully know the answer that. Perhaps I never will ever fully know the answer to that mystery. But I thought it would be fun, however self-indulgent, to uncover some of the secret answers to this question. Thus I have begun this wiki to explore what is so wonderful about the way I have been made. I invite anyone who feels so inclined to add a page to this wiki with their thoughts on why they are wonderfully made.

Coming Alive in Boston Heights, Ohio

I really can't recall the first moment that I knew I was alive. Sometime in the fall of 1947 I started the first minutes of my in-utero journey of becoming a person. Through the lens of a microscope I may have looked like a tiny meaniningless cell, yet that cell contained everything genetically that I am today. Finally on August third 1948 at about 9 AM, the infant that was me found its way out of my mother's womb and into her waiting and joyful arms. My mother was a beautiful woman when she had me. She had always had many boyfriends and she waited until the end of the war when she was just thirty to marry the handsome ex-GI who was my father. She decided to set aside her full time job as a traveling art teacher in a half dozen Akron Public elementary schools--a job she had done exceedingly well for seven years--and become a stay-at-home wife and mother. Her first child was my brother Tom born just before a late-winter snowstorm on March 9 in 1947. There are no pictures of Tommy, now a year old in August of 1948, welcoming his new baby brother home, but I'm sure he did. He has always been a brother with a big heart.

So I had the joyous experience of being a wanted and deeply cherished child. My mother would never stop cherishing me, all the way through her loss of my father to her deathbed fight with cancer in 1976, she would cherish me as she cherished my two living brothers, my lost-soldier brother and my still-living sister.

As I journey closer to the day that my mother reached when she broke free from her tortured body to become something infinitely more mysterious, I look for signs in my life that I am becoming more like her. Why is it that I want to become more like her and not more like my father who was a good husband and father? I think I do so because I witnessed my mother spending her life uncovering the mystery of God in her life. She read shelves and shelves of spiritual books and surrounded herself (and my father and us) with people who hungered and thirsted to see God's face. I admired my father for many of his traits and talents and yet it is my mother that I still wish to become. Inexplicably, I find it oddly comforting to realize that I know this for sure about myself.

When I Was Very Young