I actually cheated and started my new years resolution a little early, making broiled chicken on New Year’s Eve. Not a new recipe, but it looked so cool with the broiler reflections on the pan that I thought I might work on new pictures or step by step pictures for recipes on my website.
Inspired by my Aunt Marilynn’s Recipe Blog, I am starting a blog to document my adventures in cooking.
One of my new years resolutions this year is to eat less soy (because I’m mildy allergic to it). Accomplishing this realistically means really means dining-out less and cooking-in more. But lest I get bored of eating spaghetti every night, I shall be working on expanding my cooking repertoire to have more variety.
Sometimes I cook from recipes, but quite often, I just “throw something together” experimentally and I’d really like to document some of my concoctions, so I can remember what I liked and didn’t like about each one, so I will remember what to do differently should I try a similar recipe in the future or decide its worth repeating, like my Un-Chinese-Stir Fry.
I am reading a book called “the complete green letters” for school right now. Last night I read chapter 16 entitled “Help” and it had some revolutionary thoughts about prayer. Are you (the supposedly “mature” christian) praying “asking” (or worse, begging) God for help?
Its kind of a “spiritually immature” way to pray. It’s Satan’s technique to try and convince us that we need to ask God for things he’s already done or promised… (convicting, kind of reminded me of when Miles would share that you shouldn’t pray for salvation EVERY week that you should be thanking God that he’s already given you salvation each week). The thing is, if you’re resorting to begging God for help, you’re not trusting in the fact that he’s already promised you help, and you aren’t believing that he WILL help you.
So stop doing that, and instead pray for God to get you out of the way and for him to step in; claim (on the grounds of the blood of Jesus) the victory Jesus has already promised. Ask, yes (“ask and ye shall receive”), but beg not. Claim victory instead.
When HSE2 got back from their wilderness trip, everyone in their class was just…glowing. Positively glowing countenance. And tonight (after pastor Benjamin’s prayer night), I got to feel that glow for myself…and its just like, I finally got it…its one thing to say “we just spent a week in the presence of the Lord and that’s why we’re glowing” and another to feel what its like to sit in that presence yourself. I get it…and it just makes me hunger for more of it…makes me want to get to go on that HSE2 wilderness trip (yeah, despite all of HSE1 wilderness trip…) and get a whole *week* of what we got for one night tonight.
On my way into the building at work this afternoon I ran into one of the custodians who was mopping the floor outside the bathrooms. He asked how I was doing so I stopped to talk to him for a couple minutes.
There was a big fan blocking the door to one of the restrooms and he pointed out to me how he’d just waxed the floor in there and how shiny the floor was now and how people like using clean restrooms. You could see the pride on his face about how he’d worked hard to make that bathroom floor shine.
The furniture-moving guy (handiman essentially) was showing me once a few weeks ago how he’d (in thought of the people who would be using the conference room) rewired the lights so that the lights closest to and farthest from the projector screen were wired separate so that you could turn off only the lights near the screen but not all the lights in the room so that it would be easier to see the screen. The other day he was showing me how he was using the laser-level to get the wipe-off boards hung perfectly level across the whole wall.
But how often do we step back and think about the fact that someone took pride in making that restroom clean and inviting, or that someone else rewired the lights to make the conference room a more pleasant environment to work in? Nah, we so often sit there and focus on how our trash didn’t get emptied because there’s only one guy doing all the cleaning who “they” (management) wouldn’t “let” come back tomorrow (overtime) to empty the trashes.
Sometimes I find the “least of them” at work to be some of the most fascinating, because they just show you a perspective you don’t see from lofty people in the company. For the most part, its a very consistent attitude I’ve seen…they are here because its their job, so they try and do their job well–even though they probably won’t get any praise and glory for their job well done.
We could talk all morning about humility, but it is perhaps meaningless until you see it in practice. I have a lot of respect for those guys, they work hard, and they try real hard to just do what they do well even if what they do doesn’t sound all that impressive.
Last week I was looking up the symbolism of different things in the bible (different foods and animals and stuff) and Darren challenged me that I should look up the different colors. Its very interesting to me how throughout the bible that things have a consistent symbolic meaning. Colors were definitely interesting, but what really got me was I was thinking about the fact that we have both white and red blood cells in light of that symbolism, and how when Jesus was stabbed on the cross the white and red blood came out separately. Pretty cool stuff
For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ,
not only to believe in Him,
but also to suffer for His sake.
– Philippians 1:29
Its tough sometimes to accept that promise in the bible that your faith will be tested–and that we should endure and perservere with joy; rejoice even when we are suffering. Take heed of that promise, you will be blessed. And so I share with you a letter I wrote to a dear friend of mine to encourage her when she was enduring some suffering, because I have hope that other people may be encouraged by it as well.
I thought I’d share with you what I’d written in my journal last night as I was going through allergy attack last night myself (did I mention that?!?!) and what God was showing me. Maybe there’s something in there that would be encouraging to you too… who knows? (well, except God) 🙂
“Its so unfair” I whine and fret inwardly over and over, completely disregarding the command the bible lays out in Phillipians 2:14 to do everything without complaining. “How can something that is soo small that it can’t even be seen by the naked eye cause me to suffer so?” And “why me?” (can you hear the high-schooler mantra just waiting to whine its way through “but Mom, everyoooone else gets to…”
But God didn’t make us all to be alike did he? Each of us a unique special creation of God…for a one-of-a-kind purpose. I can (and have) prayed over and over that God would “heal” me, forgetting of course the whole part about IF it would be God’s will…selectively picking verses to show myself why the Lord ought (imagine that…me telling the Lord what he ought do??? Hello Isaiah 45:9…(“Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker, to him who is but a potsherd among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?'”).
Drat, convicted once again. But also convicted that I should be following in the footsteps of the apostle Paul, who even being beaten in prison wrote to us about suffering with joy…for no suffering for the Lord is wasted. And if the Lord desireth not to rid me of my afflictions, I can rest in the assurance that it is for the glory of God. “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him” (Phil 1:29). Instead of complaining bitterly and having a heart full of garbage, it could be a heart full of hope and joy that the Lord is calling me to suffer so that I may encourage other people through my own suffering–so that I may take some time to praise him for all the times I don’t have to endure what’s uncomfortable and inconvenient.
Some of the other verses on the joy/suffering: Romans 5:3, James 5:10, Revelation 2:10, Revelation 10:10, Revelation 2:9-10, Phil 1:27,29, 1 Peter 3:14,2:21, Romans 8:18,23-25, 1 Peter 4:12-19 🙂
From: The Top Five List humor mailing list
11. Invited entire tech-support department to play golf. Brought Melissa to complete the foursome.
10. Steve Jobs started work today. The silverware looks great, but he doesn’t do windows — yet.
9. The baby cries constantly. Maybe I’ll buy Fisher-Price.
8. Bought my first Macintosh. It’s sooooo cute!
7. Good day. Found over 15 bucks’ worth of soda cans in the trash bins outside Microsoft headquarters.
6. Bad day. Ellison sent back the heads of two of the three hitmen I hired, along with a note saying he ate the third one whole.
5. Still ahead of Murdoch and Eisner. Yes!
4. Reminder: 35-cent Snapple coupon expires in two days!
3. Memo to self: Next time, when my wife says we need to buy china, she means dishes.
2. Ran into Demi and Bruce. Upped my offer to a billion dollars.
and the Number 1 Entry in Bill Gates’s Diary…
1. Seventh day: rested.
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I have to say, when I got home yesterday, if I wasn’t so exhausted that I went straight to bed without eating (dinner? second dinner?) at get this–8:00pm, I probably would have posted about one particular thought that was grabbing at me as I drove home–I wish I could bottle up the memory of what it feels like to have spent the previous day and a half(ish) doing nothing but serving the Lord–it was just so…satisfying…and like at the point where you’re so attuned to the voice of God that the voice that says “be content with materialism, and your job, and with ‘just ok’, and don’t strive for more…” just entirely shuts itself out.
And if I could just bottle up what it feels like–and preserve that memory so that when I some time later start slipping back into the conundrums of day to day life that I could pull out the memory like a scratch-and-sniff sticker and get just a whiff of the betterness and be thrown back into the memory of just how more satisfying serving the Lord rather than fleshly desires was–because I KNOW if I every time I forgot, I could just open up my memory to what it was really like to serve, I would never want any alternative. Just a whiff of it would be enough to take me back–“back in your to your fire, to your throne, to your feet again…oh bring me back… distractions slip into my day… my flesh, my spirit is betrayed… I had such a fire in me… my soul longs to live for You”
“Religious faith has sustained the respondents through their worst days in New Orleans…..Remarkably, 81 percent said the ordeal has strengthened their belief while only 4 percent said it weakened it” — Washington Post (reposted by Lindsey http://www.livejournal.com/users/hctsbea
