Tony Longacre belonged to God. He started the Bethany Baptist Church in the basement of Thomas Hargrove’s home. Because of his success, for he was magnetic and dynamic, he was both the most admired and envied young preacher in Ocmulgee, Georgia. Until he fell in love with Marlene who made him both whole and divided and his marriage to Debra Masterson fell apart.
Rusty Cardigan, Tony’s old army buddy, had warned him that Debra was "dead between the legs" but Tony had not heeded the warning. When he announced his intent to divorce Debra and marry Marlene, the church fired him, and when he said "I hadn’t experienced God’s love until I discovered woman’s love, found myself loving and being loved by a woman" he was accused of heresy and blasphemy.
But Tony, the ex-reverend, had found the pearl of great price and the price was above everything; he was impaled on the dilemma’s horns, the same moment when he became a whole man with this woman he became a divided man with the church.
He found a way though, with this woman’s love, and Doctor Amos Doolittle’s help – he was president of Jesse Sprighton University – to create a whole family out of the chaos of his changing world.
Henry A. Buchanan is a theologian. He has been a minister of the church, a hospital chaplain, and a marriage counselor. Calling himself "a teller of tales old and new" Buchanan writes full-time now, sometimes translating his own experiences into fiction.
Buchanan is a native Georgian and he now lives in Calloway County near the little university town of Murray, Kentucky. He is a graduate of Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, and holds a Ph.D. degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Henry Buchanan is the author of AND THE GOAT CRIED, THE GOAT ALSO LAUGHED, THE MARRIAGE MYTH, THE TELEVANGELIST, THE SINNER MESSIAH, THE DAY CHRIST CAME BACK, JAY CEE, IN THE TOBACCO PATCH, THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER, ALFIE’S STORY, ALFIE AND THE MOONSHINERS, AND THE REST OF ALFIE’S STORY, and THE TALE OF THE CAT WHO HAD NO TAIL.
"I am your woman." She said it with pride, for she was a woman fulfilled.
Their destiny was sealed. They had waited for the moment when their love would be realized; now they waited for the moment when it would be known.
For it was inevitable that a love so great must be noticed. It was inevitable that they would be seen. He had said to her "For the first time in my life I understand the meaning of the words I can do all things . . . but now there is a twist to it. I can do all things through your love. Now I see that even God's love, God's strength, God's saving grace, flows into a man through a woman's love.
He trembled again at the realization of what he had just said. It was a new revelation to him, a new understanding of words he had spoken a thousand times in a different context. It was this new awareness of himself, and of her, that made him tremble. Was it also a new awareness of God Himself? Was this why he trembled uncontrollably?
"I am your woman," she repeated, and the statement seemed to him to take on ultimate meaning. He seemed to be bathed in light, and still trembling, he spoke again.
"How strange and exciting it is to discover this. Rediscover, I suppose. For now that it has happened - there I go using that word again - to us, I can see that this is what has been happening, occurring, to the true God Seekers for centuries. But instead of recognizing it, the church has denied it, declared that any recognition of it is sinful, any realization of it in human experience is evil, a thing opposed to the will of God. That the Flesh is the enemy of the Spirit."
He studied her face and wrenched out the words. "It is not so! It is not so!"
Lying in his arms she spoke her own feelings. "I feel safe, secure, beautiful in your love. Doug always kept me on the defensive. As if I were unattractive and had nothing to offer but my body, which was just being used and not respected, hallowed. Here, it is the first day of creation of a new and unspoiled world. My body is a temple. What is happening to me is something holy, sacred. It is a new perception of God for me too, for whatever I have wanted and expected from God, you have given me. What more could a woman want than the protective love of her man?"
She searched his face. Their eyes locked together. Her lips trembled as she formed the words. "I have made you my god. Apart from you my life is nothing and I am a wandering star. With you I have a fixed position in the universe."
And yet both he and she knew that the world in which they lived was not safe and secure. That one intruder to this Eden would make it untenable for the pair who lived there in splendid isolation. That if one other person became aware that the world they lived in existed, it would become unsafe, insecure, untenable. It would become a place of fears, blasted with the mildew of exposure. And they themselves would be driven from this Eden into a rock-strewn wilderness.
