You are Not Alone--Reposted from "I Take Joy"

This is taken from the blog I Take Joy.  I was struck by the truth in her words, and struck by how many people I've heard from this year who've shared that this is a particularly hard, lonely season.  Read on to see what Sally Clarkson has to share on the subject...

"We were made for friendship. Our hearts are prewired to be loved, to belong, to celebrate and share life together, in community–to bear each other’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

And so where would the evil one attack?

He would separate us to be alone, vulnerable, weak as one by ourselves in the battle for souls, so that we cannot be strong, joining arm in arm, heart to heart.

He would isolate us in neighborhoods where we live alone, with no knowledge or shared life with those nearest to us in proximity. With values and faith and ideals, that separate us from the world, but impossible to uphold alone.

He would break the close bonds of fellowship that church was made to uphold, the body knit together,  and let us go to large buildings filled with noises of music, people all around with nary an intimate friendship.

Loneliness, an epidemic. Here is the battleground.

That feeling in the dark of night that your life is invisible–Does anyone care? Does it matter that I keep dragging on day by day? Does anyone know the weariness of my soul? Do others swell with anger? Or wish for relief? or feel a lack of worth? Or want to quit and don’t even know what that means?

And so we gather, with food, drink, a little reprieve from real life, and touch someone else who shares our world. We gather to listen to His words. We gather to understand that our sacrifice is precious to the One who sacrificed all.

We gather to know we are not alone.

Our hearts are cherished and held by the one who counts our tears and sees our faith and knows our exhaustion.

We ponder Mary, alone on her journey through countries, through years of questions, through people seeking the life of her son, but because of her heart, her boldness to believe, Mary, finding favor with God, being chosen by him to bring His life into her home, so that the son of God would find comfort, beauty, love for the years he would live on earth.

A simple mother, whose heart gave all that He might have a safe haven to find rest for his baby soul.

And so, we meet to find strength, love, laughter, understanding and hope-the hope that keeps our feet on the path, our minds steadfast on our beliefs, our hearts willing to take another step of faith one more day, one more month, one more year, because once again, we know our life of giving and our love poured out is changing the world.

And so this is the message of Christmas–making time to love, giving time to talk, to share hearts to show compassion.

The gift of our time to listen and to share–it is what the baby did when he came for our sake and what we need and what will keep us worshipping a little longer.

and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25)

You are not invisible to Him, the one who came because He loved saw you and loved you.

Someone else in your life also needs to know this truth.

Today, invite a friend, call a loved one, take initiative to make room for encouragement so that your own soul needs will be met.

Buying one more thing will not satisfy. Investing love and heart time will restore, redeem, fill bring life and hope. Who needs you today? Who do you need to celebrate life with today?

Life happens when you open your door, invite and welcome, look into eyes and share life–

Wherever two or three are gathered, there I am in their midst…….

May God bless you with a new friend this season of celebrating the one who himself  took initiative in our lives, so that we would not be alone.

Food Adventures - Photo Documentation

I think I need not tell you that these girls are oodles of fun.  They were there on day 1 of the food adventures and experienced part 1 of bread making.

 Exhibit A: bread making.  Note that you should remove jewelry from your weird pruny old lady hands before kneading bread.

Then let the bread hang out under a towel to rise, butternut squash looking on.

This is the bread making work station.  A tidy little mess.

 This turned out to be a FAIL.  Apparently leaving beans out for multiple hours, though required, must happen in the fridge, which sweet Alice Waters didn't tell me.  So these suckers got nasty and had to be tossed.  Back to square 1 on the navy beans, which prolonged this cooking process by 2 hours.  Read ahead in the directions, folks.  Read ahead...

Alice Waters, though she failed to mention the bean thing, is pretty awesome.  Bread and fall minestrone soup recipes came from her book, pictured above.

 This is the only picture of finished herb focaccia bread.  Because I eated it all real fast after it came out of the oven.  Actually I think I was far too sleepy to take the final bread pictures.

 But whoa nelly, did that sucker rise!  I love the science behind that.

 Ya smoosh the dough out on that there pan, and ya let it sit AGAIN for 2 hours.  Again, read ahead folks... read ahead...

And here we have the soup and round 2 of navy beans chugging right along (smelled amazing, ps).

 Boom.  Soup.  For days.  Freeze lefty, and enjoy righty.  Later, defrost lefty and enjoy him too.

 Different day, same cookbook.  Roasted sweet potatoes with rosemary.  YUM.

The slicing, dicing, pinching area.  Where the magic starts.

 Toaster oven, where some of the magic happens...

Big oven, where the rest of the magic happens!  That's right.  Two ovens going at once.  One significantly smaller than the other.

It all turned out to be scrumptious!  Broccoli, sweet potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and butternut squash.  Amen.

Home

I'm in Mississippi. With Jared. We only got in this evening and already I love it. I love his reaction to my high school bedroom (hilarious, yall), his deep appreciation for my mom's decorative style, seeing him interact with my parents in an environment that everybody is more comfortable in... It's great. Tomorrow for Greenwood and a visit with BG! Thanksgiving Thursday (have a delightful one), along with visiting family and the cabin, and we get hang out time with Mollie on Friday! Boy oh boy oh boy this is a needed lovely break :)

I also love that despite my low blog activity, my dedicated Russian reader continues to check in with me. Cheers, friend. Or computer.

I'm thankful for you, reader :)

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Food Adventures - The Implementation

Hi.

How ya doin?  Ya good?

Good.  Me too.

So about this food adventure that I've embarked on--it's awesome.  Challenging, for sure, but really really good.

I made focaccia bread (super tasty) and minestrone soup (took forever, but it's so stinkin good), and I've enjoyed salads, yogurt with granola and banana slices for breakfast, and fresh veggies--my bank account thinks I died.  Or maybe it thinks I'm back in Mississippi (food is plentiful in Mississippi homes.  It's amazing).  I'll update with recipes and pictures soon, but I just wanted to pop in and let you know that this 2 week food adventure is really a great thing.  I'm excited to learn from this and not be so darn scared to plan ahead for some good food in the future.

Ain't no sense in eating junk food when we live in this land of plenty.  And when it's REALLY NOT THAT EXPENSIVE to eat healthy (what an awful lie).  In fact, I am spending SIGNIFICANTLY less on food than I was when I'd just get food for that meal, right then.  Planning ahead requires thought (oh boo hoo) but it doesn't require as much money.  PLUS it's healthier, more fulfilling, and honestly tastier.  Give "instant gratification" the boot that it deserves.  It never turns out well anyway.

Food Adventures - The Plan

Hello, good and faithful reader.

I have a plan.

A food plan.

A two week, eating well on a budget plan--just to see how well it will work.

And I'm super excited.

In my [somewhat limited] cooking experience, it's incredibly challenging to have something fresh, healthy, tasty, and fast.  You must sacrifice one of the 4 (at least).  I've historically sacrificed one of the first 3 far more than the speedy element, and I've been a bit convicted by that lately.  I mean, I KNOW that I'm going to be hungry later.  I KNOW that I'm going to want something fresh, healthy, tasty, and fast.  It shouldn't come as a surprise to me when, three times a day (at least), I become hungry, and yet it does!  I find myself so often unprepared for that moment!

So now that I have the space, the will, and the foresight, I'm trying out a meal plan that will stretch my culinary skills and fuel my body with fresh, delicious food.

Back story: one of the things that I was (am) most excited about concerning the move into a single apartment is the full dominance of a kitchen all my own.  I enjoy cooking.  Stems back to living with Sarah, who, upon hearing that I'd had a rough day, would don an apron, miraculously throw dinner on the stove AND some chocolate baked good in the oven within 15 minutes, and play with my hair while waiting on food magic to finish.  She's so maternal that it's contagious.  I was inspired to be domestic!  I wanted to learn to cook fun things--I knew what I liked to eat at other places, and that was the first kitchen I'd had to play in since I lived at home (and everybody knows that home kitchen is Mama's Domain--unless your dad's the cooking one in the fam fam).  And so commenced cooking lessons with Sarah: salmon and orzo, whole wheat pancakes, butternut squash bundt cake, double chocolate rum cake (be still, my beating heart) and much much more.

Sarah and I had one difference: style of cleanliness.  She was not a dirty roommate.  I just happen to be a little neurotic about hygiene.  See, I've historically been stupidly terrified of throwing up.  Vom-vom is not my thing, ok?  So I know nearly every cleanliness, hygiene, bacteria clean-up rule in the book.  And precisely how violating that rule will KILL YOU, and if not kill you, make you vom-vom, which is worse.

So, basically, only my mother is sufficiently clean for me.  She knows all the cleanliness rules, too.  And my dad rolls his eyes at her as she lysols the kitchen counter just like Sarah rolled her eyes at me.  Just like Jared does even today.

But today, I can lovingly say, "Jared, if you don't like the cleanliness standards of this kitchen, you can sit in the living room, cuz this is MY KITCHEN, SIR!"

And it's the first time I've been able to say something like that!

But back to the food adventures.

So I went to India, right?  Camebackmovedjumpedbackintoworkhitthegroundrunning.  Haven't really had time to think about cooking anything, except some lemon rosemary garlic chicken last Sunday, which was an epic success, if I do say so myself.  Cooking that very meal inspired me.  It was time to go grocery shopping.

Grocery shopping... with a plan.

I went to Sprouts, a sort of commercial farmers market (isn't that contradictory?...), and left with a backseat FULL of food to last me for at least a week (maybe 2), and for only $35.  I got navy beans, pine nuts, yogurt, dry yeast, olive oil, pasta, bay leaves, broccoli, squash, celery, salad (curly endive lettuce), garlic, parsley, kale, carrots, onions, mushrooms, bell pepper, and bananas.  ALL FOR $35, YALL.  Now, argue with me that you can't be healthy and frugal all at once.

You can't be healthy, frugal, and impatient all at once.  But if you plan ahead, just a little bit, and are willing to experiment, just a little bit, you'd be crazy surprised.

On the menu for this week (all food this week will be consumed within my $50 limit, which means after grocery shopping, I still have $15 if I need to do a little more shopping):

-Herb bread
-Curly endive salad with homemade vinaigrette
-Aioli, also homemade
-Fall minestrone soup with kale and butternut squash
-Pasta with oil, garlic, and herbs
-Roasted vegetables (carrots, onions, new potatoes, butternut squash, broccoli, mushrooms)

On the menu NEXT week (with a $30 limit because many of these ingredients will already be here!):

-More herb bread
-More salad (I want to learn to really enjoy a good salad)
-Polenta torta
-Homemade pesto sauce
-Pizza using said sauce
-Pasta using said sauce
-Edamame
-Quiche
-1,2,3,4 Cake (kinda my "reward")

Basically, the plan is to make one BIG challenging thing a week using fresh seasonal veggies (week 1 is the minestrone soup, week 2 is the polenta torta).  The game plan is to freeze half of the soup and half of the torta to whip out later (like, in a few weeks) when I'm in need of a quick tasty meal, and use the others as take-along lunches or "oh look!  Leftovers!" for dinner this week.  The other things on the menu are either things I've made before, so I'm comfortable with whipping them out, or they're so easy to make it should be illegal.

I'm not the most adventurous cooker ever, so I'll be blogging about all this, complete with pictures (if I can figure out how to grow another arm to take pictures while cooking...), and, yall, if I can do it, you can too.  I'll let you know what's easy, what works, and what doesn't.  And if you're in town, come cook with me :)  it's always more fun to cook with company.

Pictures are here! From India! Via facebook.

Rather than waiting on ALL the good pictures to load on here (takes years, folks), I'm giving you the link to the facebook album, viewable whether you have facebook or not!

This is the Women's Conference part of the trip.

And...  This is the "oops, Cole lost her passport so we're stuck in London first" part of the trip.

The "Bangalore, running around, visiting with awesome people" part is coming soon.  Even facebook doesn't have that yet, so you're now caught up :)

I have been rather anticlimactic about this September India trip.  Too much happened around it to give it the blog space that it deserves.  Moving and adding 10 more hours of work, while nesting, visiting with family, and starting to lead a small group is--turns out--a little time consuming.  Thus I find myself blogging at midnight-30 on a work night.  All because I love you dearly and I want you to feel that you're not some creepy outsider looking in, but rather that you're invited in to enjoy life with me.  Even if that life is a little strange and filled with more than its fair share of mini-crises.

Not that there's anything mini about losing a passport.

That was a big crisis.

Definitely the biggest yet.

It got its share of blog space, though, so enough about that.



Confession.  Another reason for the fewer number of posts is that Meg Shideler has introduced me to pinterest.com.  Be still, my beating heart.  It's just what I needed and didn't need all at once.  A visual, aesthetically pleasing way to organize bookmarks, favorites, or otherwise neat things that somehow improve life just a little.

You can find my pins and boards here.

It's amazing and addictive.

Join us.  There are pumpkin cheesecake recipes...

Ok. Now I Have No Excuse

Oh, sweet lonely reader.

You sit for hours at a time, constantly refreshing your browser in the hope that I've updated my blog. You count the long, unkind days between posts, worrying that I've died (no one ever comments on this blog, so how would you know if something tragic happened?? Who would think to inform her lost and lonely blog world audience??). You lament the lost moments, the topics untouched, the treasure trove of posts that never were...

And it's not like I don't have internet now.

Yep. I've had internet for almost a week, and still no update. No collage of India pictures. No collection of short stories about auto rides and accidentally eating whole curry-spiced chilies (Happened. Hurt.).

I'm a terrible blogger when you judge by faithfulness.

Please don't remove me from your Google Reader list.

I'll get better, I promise.

I love you.

*remorse*

*flowers*?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Oh hi!

I admit it.

I've been neglecting you.

It's not you.  It's me.

See, I came back from India, encountered jet lag and packing, and jumped back into work.

Then I moved.

And now I don't have Internet at my new house.

Not yet, anyway.

So I don't have the ability to just perch in the comfort of my own [really cute new] home and upload pictures and tell you guys stories, even though that's EXACTLY what I want to do.

Because I have about 6000 pictures.

Ok.  Maybe not quite that many.  But kinda close.

But about that many stories.

Game plan:  I'm going to have a housewarming party sometime soon.  Like, within the next 2 weeks.  If you're in FtW or have the ability to be, all I ask is that you come and bring a black frame (preferably one for a 4x6 photo, but I'm flexible)--you choose the style as long as it's black, and at the housewarming party you can pick the India/UK picture to put in the frame!  I want a full wall of black frames with India trip pictures, so that fun day will come soon.  Just get your thinking caps on.

Anyway, lots going on this month--I moved already, so now I'm unpacking, Jared and I are leading a small group (2 days to get the house in working order!), my daddy's coming to town!, 4 friends are getting married (2 to each other, so that's convenient), I'm babysitting a little (I'd like to do more if you know of anybody in the area who needs a babysitter with a weird schedule), there's a prayer retreat, and halloween is coming.  FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN stuff filling my calendar.

But now I need to go work.

And think about ordering a sofa.

I'm such a grownup!