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.