Although this isn’t a foodie blog, I’ve had a couple of requests (Hi Mom1 and Mom2!) to post a few of the meals I’ve been putting together to stay within my Pure Food criteria.  While I’m not sure these are terribly creative, they are tasty, some of them are pretty fast, and they are satisfying, which helps.  No sense in eating right and still being hungry all the time!  It’s really been a change for me to cook only this way, instead of occasionally this way, but so far, so good.  And because I am not publishing a cookbook, I apologize for not having measurements of things, but I rarely ever cook that way, and these are fairly simple ideas.  You can add whatever spice you want if you decide to make any of them. You’ll also notice heavy use of “sauté”.  Yeah, well, that’s how I roll most of the time.

Breakfast

• Protein shake – for me, that’s Almased, soy milk, a spoonful of natural peanut butter, and perhaps half a banana.  The brand really isn’t important, as long as it’s got lots of protein and the carbs are very low-glycemic.  (I’m not paid by Almased to promote them, but if they’d like to toss an extra can my way, I sure wouldn’t say no!)
• Eggs – scrambled, hard-boiled, whatever floats your boat, but NOT loaded with cheese, sorry.
• Spoonful of natural peanut butter – this is in a time-crunch emergency, and I don’t recommend it, but I am here to be truthful, and this has occasionally been my out-the-door breakfast.

Lunch

Half the time, it’s leftovers from the night before.  The rest of the time, I make a salad with spinach and whatever chopped up veggies I’ve managed to prepare ahead of time, along with some kind of protein like chicken or canned tuna or salmon.  My absolute favorite so far is:

spinach
grape tomatoes
tiny pre-cooked salad shrimp (I pack them in a separate bag, frozen, and they thaw through the morning, so at lunchtime I just pat them on a paper towel and toss them on the salad)
half an avocado scooped out in chunks
home-made vinaigrette – I take a tiny lidded container in the morning and pour in a glug of extra-virgin olive oil (splurge on the good stuff, it matters) along with a splash of whatever vinegar sounds good – rice vinegar works with the shrimp.  Shake in a little sea salt and some pepper and seal.  At lunch time, shake it a few seconds and drizzle over the salad.

Dinner

Here’s where the theme really takes over: protein, veggies, some sort of “starch”.  It helps tremendously to make a big pot of brown rice early in the week and put it in the fridge for use all week long. Also, when those steamer-bags of frozen veggies go on sale for $1 each, STOCK UP.  Of course, cheap frozen vegetables in their non-steamer bags can simply be dumped into a microwave-safe pot, pour in water while you count to 3, cover, and microwave for about 5 minutes.

• Turkey meatballs:  Mix up 1 pound (there – a measurement!  It’ll be the last one!) lean ground turkey with an egg, a big handful of chopped fresh flat-leaf (italian) parsley, a goodly amount of pre-cooked rice, a shake of onion flakes, a little garlic (minced or powdered, whatever), some pepper and some sea salt.  Form into medium (golf-ball) sized balls and bake on a cookie sheet at 350 for somewhere around 15 minutes, or until they look golden brown on the outside.  I always sacrifice one to cut in half to be sure they’re done.  I recommend putting a baking rack on the cookie sheet and putting the meatballs on that so what little fat they do have drains nicely.  Serve with sautéed greens or whatever steamed colorful veggies are handy and a salad.

• Fried rice:  Scramble an egg or two very dry.  Move the eggs to a bowl, wipe out the pan, add a little olive oil, and sauté chopped onion along with whatever else you like (for me, it’s small-chopped carrot, mushrooms, and peas, although I usually just steam the peas in the microwave and add them last minute to the finished dish).  When they’re good and cooked, add them to the eggs in the bowl.  Now dump cooked rice into the skillet, add a dash of olive oil if it looks like it needs it, and toss it around until it’s warmed through.  Add the veggies and eggs back in, and use the spatula to chop up the eggs well.  Drizzle with low-sodium soy sauce and stir for a minute or so, and it’s done!  Serve this alongside turkey patties or chicken breasts, or for a meal in a bowl, add diced cooked chicken or freshly sautéed shrimp straight in to the rice.  This makes a great second-day lunch too!

• Chicken with quinoa (keen-wah) pilaf:  Gently pan-cook boneless skinless chicken breasts (seasoned however you like) in a small drizzle of olive oil in a skillet.  Butterfly them if they’re too big to cook through nicely.  Meanwhile, cook the quinoa according to package directions.  If it’s new to you, quinoa is a grain, or more accurately, a seed.  It cooks just like rice and has the benefit of lots of goodness and no gluten.  In a separate skillet, sauté some diced onion and whatever else sounds good (I had set aside chopped carrot and mushrooms from making fried rice the night before).  When the veggies are cooked and the quinoa is done, add the quinoa to the skillet with a small sprinkle of seasoned salt. Serve with the chicken and some steamed broccoli splashed with a little lemon juice.

• Turkey Un-burger:  Buy or form lean ground turkey patties.  Cook them in a skillet like hamburgers.  Slice cooked, chilled polenta and, in another skillet or when the turkey’s done, warm up a drizzle of olive oil and put in the slices of polenta.  Cook until lightly golden brown, flipping halfway through.  Keep the heat to medium and be patient, because they will definitely burn if it’s too hot.  To pre-prepare the polenta yourself, cook it the night before, take any leftovers while they’re warm, and smooth them into a cookie sheet.  Chill overnight in the fridge and cut into cubes or blocks the next day.  Or, buy pre-cooked polenta in a tube like cookie dough, and slice out of the package like I do.  Serve the turkey patty over a couple of slices of the now crispy polenta, with a side of whatever veggies you’re in the mood for.  Sprinkle with a small amount of seasoned salt or other spices.

And the list goes on.  I bought several types of frozen fish fillets this week, so we’ll go more seafood.  I’m thinking salmon with a balsamic glaze!

Tomorrow is Easter Dinner at Mom1 and Dad1’s, and I can’t wait.  M1 was a little nervous about cooking for us now that we’re in the heart of the revolution, but I think I’ve managed to convince her that it is really easy.  We LOVE roasted leg of lamb, especially at Easter, and that will be the main dish.  Instead of the crispy roasted potatoes soaking up the drippings, we’ll have a roasted mix of sweet potatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, onions, and carrots, which we all love.  Peas for the green veggie, crisp pan-seared polenta cubes for the starch, and a tossed salad on the side.  The only item left to question is the mint jelly.  I don’t know who ever thought to spoon minted apple jelly over roasted lamb, but it is essential to the experience.  I realize jelly is made with lots of sugar, but I will still have a small spoonful because crushed mint leaves just will not do.  That sounds like a celebration dinner to me!

And it is a celebration.  Tomorrow is Easter, a day my family holds very sacred and holy.  And JOYFUL.  Christ died so you and I don’t have to offer sacrifices any more.  So we can stand pure and blameless in front of God, without the pollution of our sin fogging the view.  So we can live in a relationship with Him.  So we can live peacefully, free from the guilt and shame of bad choices, free from debilitating anger, free from addictions and fear and bondage. Because the more we exercise our choice to follow Him, the less enjoyment we find in living for self.  The more we seek Him out, the more delight He takes in our relationship and the more fun it is to serve someone who finds joy in us.  The more we follow His directions, the more satisfying and productive our outcomes.  The more we are filled with His spirit, the more we learn how to truly love our neighbor as ourself. And the more time we spend getting to know Him, the more exciting we find the prospect of eternity with not a distant rule-based God but a loving, holy Father who cherishes us enough to have paid for our sin.  May each of you have that peace and freedom in the love of Christ this Easter. He is Risen!

So our household (being in total: 2 adults and 2 cats plus, I am sorry to say, a current herd of dust bunnies) is now a week and a half into this Pure Food Healthy Living plan.  On the whole, it is successful thus far.  I’m getting into a groove of multi-tasking my cooking time, so not only am I preparing the meal I’m about to eat, but I’m also cooking, chopping, or assembling something that will make the next day’s meals faster.  Most nights, I also make enough of what we’re going to eat to make lunches for both of us for the next day.

J is more reassured that I’ve not taken a wild turn towards serving anything disturbing like jellied octopus tentacles flambé (no offense to anyone who thinks that sounds delish) or overly fiber-intensive like twig and bark salad with a side of hay.  To keep from getting too overwhelmed, I’ve settled into a preliminary pattern of protein (usually chicken or fish or shrimp), plentiful veggies nicely seasoned and either steamed or sautéed, and some sort of grain, like brown rice, polenta, or quinoa.  It may take a while for me to figure out how to elevate the interest factor a little.  Chicken piccata would be great, but no dredging in white flour, and I decline at the moment to pay $12 for a small bag of almond flour instead.  Scrambled eggs are allowed and delicious, but I will admit that on a couple (3) rushed mornings, I’ve swallowed down a spoonful of (natural) peanut butter on the run and called it breakfast.

I’m quite pleased to be feeling healthier already (and, by the way, to have dropped 9 pounds in 8 days), and to spend less money on food since we’re not eating out or grabbing convenience food multiple many times a week.  I am not quite so pleased to face up to the difficulty I’m having in matching this success in other areas of my life.  For my focus to stay at full throttle at work, my family to be attended to, and my eating to be healthy and hearty, my house is not quite so shiny, my Read the Bible In A Year plan is a couple of weeks lagging, my Bible study homework is becoming more scribbles and less thought-out each week, and my days have evolved (devolved?) into a ridiculously predictable routine, down to knowing what time I’ll be brushing my teeth each morning and what time I’ll crash on the bed with my laptop at night. Oh yes, and did you hear I started a blog?

Part of the purpose of the blog is to work out some of the many, MANY questions in my head, and this one is one of the biggest… how do we balance it all, when all of it is good stuff?  I am not too thrilled at this point by what I think may be the answers:  less down time, more work on the weekends.  When it’s crunch time, I can go go go like the Energizer Bunny until I’m at the absolute breaking point, but that is not at all my natural state of being.  I’m a curl-up-with-a-book kinda girl who loves nap times and fuzzy blankets. But each day there is much to be done and miles to go before I sleep.

A lot of women have spent a lot of years stepping out from stereotypes to say, “I can have it all!”  Well, I can’t.  Not without a personal staff, and then I don’t have it all, because I’m paying them to have some of it.  So I suppose that admission is somewhat freeing.  The bare honest truth is that I’ve spent most of my life comparing myself to another woman.  She is thinner, with better style, she is successful, she breezes through situations with the right word, the right amount of laughter, and the right touch of empathy.  She’s not klutzy, she is sweet tempered, and she only ever thinks the best of anyone. She doesn’t know I look at her this way, because she doesn’t exist.  She’s the Me that I, in weaker moments, castigate myself for not being.  If I’d been Her from the beginning, I wouldn’t have to make such radical changes in my life.  If I was Her from the beginning, I would have already read the Bible through so many times I’d have it memorized. If I was Her… I maybe wouldn’t understand grace as well, because I wouldn’t need it so often. So I am not Her.  I am Me.  And while Me is being re(de)fined at present, I see that I must trust God that Matthew 11:28 is true.

If you’re tired too, I’ll trust it for you as well.  Meanwhile, I need to go give my husband the anniversary cards I bought yesterday, and have only written in today, when our anniversary was Monday.

I haven’t gone into too much detail here about exactly how I’ve changed my eating, other than that it’s essentially “pure food” – no packaging, and no preservatives.  That’s true, but it actually goes a little beyond that to no sugar, and no gluten, either.  For years diets have told us to check the “glycemic index” of food, to see if it contains the same kinds of carbs our bodies convert straight to sugar, but lately it seems to be catching on in a deeper way.

This isn’t a diet for me, though, it’s a revolution of my eating as well as my thinking.  I finally started listening, and in light of the strong tendency to diabetes in both my family and my husband’s, I’ve started doing some research.  Two very recent articles have really grabbed my attention.  One is Is sugar toxic? – CBS News.  I didn’t get to watch this last night but I read the transcript today and it’s really kind of horrifying.  In a (good for you!) nutshell, sugar doesn’t just convert to fat.  It affects our cholesterol and, by directly spiking our own insulin, can make some tumors grow faster!  So, we cut out the candy, right?  It’s far more reaching than that… overwhelmingly so.  Grab any package on the shelf (even some in the “natural” section), and you will find sugar high on the ingredient list.  If not sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, which is just as bad.  It’s in EVERYTHING.  The “healthy” whole-grain bread, peanut butter, salad dressings… it’s endless.  And since it acts on our brain instantly to release feel-good dopamine, it’s very addictive.  And that’s just the processed sugar.  There’s also the food our body converts into sugar, like white potatoes.

So as a former addict, was it hard to stop the sugar?  Yes and no.  It was overwhelming at the beginning of last week when I had a stark, bare, pantry and had to rebuy a food supply that didn’t include sugar.  And this is a girl whose ultimate treat is a Cinnabon with extra frosting.  Was.  I was at a lovely party this weekend, and the star of the food table was a beautiful chocolate-frosted chocolate cake.  I’d already survived passing up parts of the other eats that were off my list (like the cute flower-shaped sandwiches since bread is out, and the crackers and cheese because crackers = bread and oh yeah, I’m also off dairy for at least 6 weeks.  More on that later.), and normally I’d feel like I deserved a tiny piece of cake as a treat, but this time I passed.  Someone who knows I’m on this journey asked me if it was hard to give up the cake, and to my surprise I answered, “No”.

It’s not hard right now, because this isn’t just science, or medical logic, but a spiritual issue.  I believe God is asking me to submit my most basic wants to Him, and I am certain that some of the information that’s crossed my path recently is by His direction.  Saying no to cake simply because it will keep me from losing weight is a frail premise – many times before I’ve alternately given in and eaten the cake, or stood firm for that moment but obsessed over it.  This weekend, though, I was free.  I know exactly how delicious chocolate cake tastes, but armed with all the knowledge of what it will do inside my system and how clearly God has called me to walk away from that, I have no desire any more to eat it.  I did learn a good lesson though… if you want to eat healthy, plan ahead!  I certainly don’t expect any hostess or anyone around me to cater to the choices I’ve made, but I do realize I’m going to get pretty hungry eating nothing but fruit and raw veggies at a lunchtime party, so a bag of nuts in the purse is highly advised!

One more article on the diabetic line of things… I read this last week: Why the New Surgical Cure for Diabetes Will Fail!  I think the title should maybe say “May Fail”, but obviously it doesn’t have the same impact.  The article refers to the new study in the news regarding the reversal of diabetes in gastric bypass patients, shortly after surgery and long before major weight loss is achieved.  It discounts that study somewhat, because while the research is true, the same results are achievable with diet changes, in as little as ONE WEEK.  That’s amazing!  Please understand, I have friends who have achieved tremendous success with bariatric surgery and I wish them all the continued health and happiness life can possibly contain.  But it is eye-opening to learn how much POWER we have over ourselves.  Hook into God, and the power is unlimited!  I’m not diabetic, but I could easily be soon if I hadn’t started this change.  And I don’t believe my food revolution will prevent every and all disease from knocking at my door.  I do believe, though, that “I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength” – Philippians 4:13.

What’s He giving you the strength to walk away from?

I had to giggle tonight, standing in my kitchen.  I was patting myself on the back for salvaging dinner after my sauteed kale went to the land of burnt garlic.  My on-the-fly no recipe turkey meatballs were browning nicely in the oven, I had a backup container of peas to replace the greens, and while I didn’t have time to make polenta from scratch, I had remembered you can buy it pre-made near the eggs at Kroger.  It has 3 ingredients: cornmeal, water, and salt.  That fits my “pure food” criteria to a T.

I’ve discovered in the last few years that I love pan-seared polenta, so I sliced off rounds similar to cookie dough and slid them into a pan lightly brushed with olive oil.  Feeling like I was getting a handle on this cooking completely from scratch business, I flipped the rounds, admired the golden brown color, and took the package back to the fridge.  The serving suggestions on the back caught my eye.  They recommended exactly what I was doing, but they labeled it “Fried Mush.”  Just when I was feeling like the Modern Woman Handling It, I realized I had actually morphed into Granny, my long-gone great-grandmother.  Granny was so used to “pure food” cooking that when Alzheimer’s was at its height, she got up in the middle of the night and cooked everything in the kitchen, thinking it was harvest time and she had to care for the hired farm hands that would need a hearty meal before a long day in the fields.

So then I started thinking of all the inventions that have proven, for me at least, somewhat less than beneficial.  Bathroom cleaner is spray-and-walk-away fast, to be sure, but my skin can’t tolerate it, so it’s a steamer, a scrub brush, and time instead.  My cellphone is a lifeline, family connector, and Facebook enabler, but remember when we used to pay around $30 for our old corded phone bills that covered all members of the family?  Even with a “family plan”, the average cell phone bill for a couple is now $100.  I used to cook when I felt like it, and filled in the gaps with convenience food whenever I didn’t, and now I’m working very hard, literally, to recover from the damage.

Here’s the miserable truth to it… I am lazy.  I don’t mean I don’t work hard, but when work is done, I want to come home, plop down, and have everything at my fingertips.  That has not paid off well.  It causes inconsistency, lack of energy, and grumbling.  So I’m listening closer to Colossians 3:23-24, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”  I will just Do It. I’ll trust Him to give me rest.  I’ll quit ignoring the truth that often the “convenience” costs more time and money than the simple Doing.  I acknowledge that I can’t possibly fit everything I want to do in a day, so I’ll re(de)fine my days to take care of the territory God has given me, and let Him decide when to enlarge it.  And I’ll get more sleep…. starting tomorrow.

That healthy living energy burst I’m supposed to have thanks to all this pure food eating has apparently been stuck in traffic for the last three days.  I am Tired.  So while I continue to figure out how to get the right amount of protein at the right time (and pay the bills  and spend some time with God and try not to work too late and vacuum once in a while and did you all KNOW how fast dishes pile up when you cook everything from scratch??) and hopefully go to bed earlier than midnight for once, here’s something entirely different – a poem I wrote years ago.  Why?  It’s been spinning the windmills of my mind, so I’m purging it here so I can get some sleep!

Wishes

If wishes were fishes and fishes were free
would you hold them in close in a bowl to be seen
by convex, staring faces, who rudely intrude
on the small, fragile wishes, who end up as food
for a larger, toothed wish-fish dropped in by a hand
that’s attached to an arm and a mind in demand
by those frightened by wishes, who wish to obscure
flagrant wishings and hopings and dreamings that pure
minds engender in moments of quiet and thought?
Not considered this yet?  Well then… perhaps you ought.

Nitey-nite, and God Bless  🙂

A brief recap of Day 1 of Total Healthiness:

• Feelin’ pretty good
• Lots of chopping though.  Lotttts of chopping.
• Feel like I perhaps deserve some small medal of sticking-with-it for doing all the above chopping with raw, split eczema fingers.
• Kale chips, YES!!!
  • Remove and discard kale stems, tear leaves into chip-sized pieces, wash and dry thoroughly.  Toss lightly with olive oil on a sheet pan and sprinkle with salt (I did half the pan with seasoned salt and half with low-sodium soy sauce).  Bake at 350 for exactly 10 minutes.  Ridiculously good! If you have enough self-restraint to have leftovers (like myself… once I made a second pan full), store them in an airtight container at room temperature.
• I like to cook, and I think I’m pretty good at it.  Except for making rice from scratch.  I SUCK at that.  Rice cooker added to wish list henceforth!
• But preparing everything from scratch all the time forever?  I’m committed, but the whole of it is too daunting to consider.  I’ll think about that tomorrow.  After all, tomorrow is…. another day!

Over the last year, for a multitude of reasons I’ll share in more detail later, I’ve begun to think of food as a spiritual issue.  Not in relation to quantity, although the New Testament isn’t shy about pointing out gluttony as a sin.  In my case, it’s more of a chemical composition issue.  I stopped cleaning with commercial products about a year ago, primarily because of adult-onset eczema on my hands and psoriasis on my legs.  Sorry for that un-lovely picture, but the absolute misery of my fingers cracking open after swiping a counter with cleaning wipes or using window cleaner meant something had to change.  I discovered the joys of a seemingly bottomless $2 jug of white vinegar, the power of steam, and the difference made by dye-free, fragrance-free laundry products.  It also took a lot of medical intervention, and after dozens of painful steroid shots in every tender, broken-out area of my legs, I have clear skin there, with my hands showing a lot of improvement. That’s ground I do NOT want to lose.

So what does that have to do with what I eat?   As I began to purge the artificially manufactured chemical compounds from my countertops, I started giving a closer look to food labels.  Long-story short, I feel conviction that I am not honoring God with the artificially manufactured chemical compounds that most purchased package food is filled with.  I have enough genetic doom and gloom hanging over me; I don’t need to help it along!  When God gave manna to the Israelites, it was exactly enough for that day, it wasn’t packaged, and it wasn’t meant to be hoarded for a later, easier preparation.  When Daniel refused the king’s dishes, faith and pure, simple food helped him thrive.

I’m sure not pointing a finger at anyone else’s pantry, but I’ve done a total purge of mine.  Actually, my husband did the purge yesterday, so I can do the refilling today.  That’s important, also.  I can’t do this on my own.  I’m not strong enough to give up some of the foods I love if someone right next to me is still eating them daily, but I’ve shared my concerns, conviction, and some very enlightening reading with J, and he is on board with me.  In his words “I’m a little scared of the food, but excited about how I’ll feel.”   Fair enough.  He has some of the same genetic gloom, and he is fully motivated to give it a shot.  For us, it’s not following a particular “ism”, it’s not crash dieting, and, while I am beginning by following the plan in The Blood Sugar Solution by Dr. Mark Hyman, it’s not chasing after a guru either.  It’s learning to submit my eating to the Lord, to pay attention when He is clearly putting tools and lessons in my path, and to serve Him inside and out.  So here we go!!

I really love my commute.  It’s 45 minutes each way, and as I am NOT a morning person, the pre-dawn chirp of my alarm clock is usually offset by a nice, mellow drive through rolling farmland, allowing me to gradually gear up for a busy day.  In the evening I’m more tired, but tonight I had sweeping views of rain clouds blowing across the sky, a wild sunset to the west, and to the east, a complete, perfect rainbow.

When I saw the rainbow tonight, I did what I always do: count the colors, try to spot where the end falls, and remember what God said in Genesis 9:16 “When the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”   That is a profound promise.  God isn’t off somewhere else while rainbows bloom and fade on auto-pilot.  He is turning His face to study each one, actively maintaining a permanent commitment to us.  I’ve been working through “The Patriarchs”, a Beth Moore Bible study, and the lessons have taken us deep into the heart of the kind of promises God has made and kept.

How shallowly we often make promises ourselves.  “I’ll pick it up after work.”  “I’ll never do that again.”  “I’ll pray for you every day.”  A day or two later, life has submerged the promise to the depths, wedged under a rock of good intentions.  I love my husband deeply, and we have absolute trust between the two of us.  Even so, like children, there are times when one of us makes a promise, and the other, just for a tiny bit of extra reassurance, will hold out their hand, pinky extended.  We link pinkies in relief, because we know this means it absolutely 100% will happen.  We do not break a pinky promise, ever. Which really means we know how humanity operates.  We’re both aware of times we’ve broken other promises or been let down, and we can’t stand the thought of this being one of those times.

The study lessons have stirred up a question in me to which, until recently, I didn’t know I needed to answer.  I’ve read the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all my life, and I’ve never had a problem believing God made them promises and stuck to them.  The world is fallen, people break promises, bad things happen to good people, etc., etc. but God always delivers.  No problem.  My question is… what is He promising me?  I’ve felt His guidance, I’ve had prayers answered (“Yes” AND “No”), and I’ve experienced coincidences and interceptions that could only have been God.  But while my journey has been heavy on the faith that He is there, walking with me, it has been noticeably thinner in the experience of hearing “This is where I am taking you.”  And let me be clear, I haven’t forgotten that faith is having not, yet still believing.  But I crave a more two-way communication, and I’m seeing more clearly that it’s not God’s voice that’s weak, it’s my listening skills that are often full of static and showing signs of spiritual ADD.

Several years ago, I was driving in downtown Lexington during a severe thunderstorm.  Severe.  I was white-knuckling the steering wheel, trying to keep the car on the road, looking out for falling trees, and waiting to hear the train-roar of a tornado coming.  Traffic crawled to a stop at a red light and I sat there, still gripping the wheel, when I realized I had been constantly praying “God help me” for the last few minutes.  As I sat, the clouds lifted, just a little, and while the rain still pounded down, somewhere above it all, a ray of sunlight managed to break through.  Light started to glow through the glass of my sunroof, but it wasn’t golden sunlight.  It was red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.  I WAS the end of the rainbow.  It only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like minutes, and I was able to breathe, uncurl my fingers from the steering wheel, and whisper “Thank you” before the stoplight turned green.  God extended not just a pinky, but a full-blown, Biblical promise, because He had been listening.  To me.  I can surely return the favor.

I have written, rewritten, and discarded more posts than I can count, but for the first time, I’ve decided to move them out of my head and onto a blog.  I’m a busy woman, trying to balance my marriage, job, friends, hobbies, activities and church under the umbrella of my faith in God.  And while adding on a blog isn’t going to take anything else away, perhaps part of my reason for launching whatever this will become is the major milestone coming up in my life.  Let’s just say it vaguely rhymes with “lordy” and leave it at that!

I’ve been a Christian since I was 9, and God has been so faithful and so patient to help me grow. The one lesson I’m not sure I’ll be finished with in this lifetime, though, is allowing Him to peel away Me.  My dreams, my hopes, my understanding of His love and His plans… all laid down for trust in those plans.  Often, His plan has fulfilled what I’d already handed to Him, but not always.  So, I am always assured I have more to learn, but thankfully, I have learned that I have even more to gain.  Freedom is not getting my way.   Freedom is knowing that the lighter I travel, the higher I soar. Hallelujah, He can be trusted!

Let’s make a deal – we’ll encourage one another with that truth as often as possible, ok?   And I’ll share my lessons here, if for nothing else than to be able to look back and be reminded of that very thing.