Tag Archives: faith

Sometimes In Spite of Your Best Preparations, The Thing You Hope Doesn’t Happen Happens.

Posted on by under Uncategorized

We have the best sort of bed nets, treated with insecticide that’s harmful to bugs but not humans.

We have the best sort of malaria-prevention drugs, the kind with few side effects, and we take it every day.

We have treated our clothing with the spray that’s harmful to bugs but not humans (see above.)

{You could say that, like my father before me, my motto is “trust God and be as prepared as humanly possible.”}

Even so, our son Graeme (age 4.5) came down with a mild case of malaria this past week, along with some sort of infection that sent his white blood cell count a-soaring and gave him a fever.

There’s nothing like your children getting ill to make you feel powerless. Oh, you take them to the clinic or the doctor’s office or the hospital, or some combination thereof, you fill prescriptions, and you Google various treatment options.

(I used my husband’s computer for a moment, and when he came back to it, he remarked, “you know it’s a hard day when your most recent Google search is “oral rehydration solution recipe.” True enough.)

But even with all our efforts at healing and comfort, we are not fully in control. We can’t filter out the p. falciparum or the streptoccocus or whatever strain of influenza is making the rounds. We can’t wave a magic wand and make it all better now!

240px-Plasmodium_falciparum_01

I hate this so much, because I like to believe that all my good preparations (see above) and even, to some degree, my worrying, will keep bad things at bay. When the lab test came back showing that Graeme had malaria in his blood, well, it was as if the universe was laughing at those plans. I do not like this one bit.

Of course, we were able to make sure that Graeme was getting the best possible treatment, and to monitor him carefully and offer him lollipops in a variety of flavors to take away the bitterness of the quinine syrup and so forth. We are the lucky ones, the unimaginably blessed ones, at least materially speaking.

He is already feeling much better, but I can’t stop thinking of those mothers and fathers who don’t have the luxury of phoning tropical disease experts and consulting with different doctors to optimize treatment plans. I can’t stop thinking of how grateful I am not to be in that position, but also, of how, even with all these advantages, there’s very little I can control, and I find myself still just begging God to be merciful, and to give me the grace to extend that mercy to those who don’t have those luxuries.

There Are Good Reasons We Love Pinterest

Posted on by under Uncategorized

(and Etsy, and crafty blogs, and…)

Three years ago, I came upon a popular blog that kind of changed my life. It seemed to have it all–sustainable living, peaceful, joyful family life, relaxed homeschooling, great food, plenty of outdoor time, lots of good books, and abundant handmade crafty goodness–captured in friendly, relaxed prose and appealing, soft-focus photographs.

I bought this blogger’s book. I waited impatiently for every new post. I took up knitting again, this time with a vengeance. I learned to sew (finally, for real this time.) I broke out my sketchbooks and pencils once again. I made my own yogurt and cheese and bread. I set up lovely, natural, seasonal crafty projects for my kids.

Now, I was kind-of sort-of doing all (or at least most) of those things already, or had done them in childhood. But this blogger reminded me of things I’d forgotten I loved; things that, when I took them up again, changed my life because they helped me keep myself much, much better company–knitting and sewing and baking and gardening got me out of my head and into my body and my surroundings somehow, in a way that was really, really good.

Making things feeds something in us. I do think we humans are made to make things. There is a satisfaction that comes from completing a project–however mundane or marvelous–that is about more than just survival; more than just ‘getting by’ and passing along our genes or whatever. The impulse to make beauty and order–whether we’re simply talking about transforming dirty clothes to fresh, folded ones, raw ingredients like flour and butter and salt into puff pastry, or cast-away junk into something usable and pretty–is God-given.

There’s a story about the early years of ‘ready-mix’ type foods that tells about a ‘complete’ cake mix that flopped with consumers: it contained everything–powdered eggs, milk, and fat–and so required only the addition of water. There wasn’t enough creative work to do, so the mixes were re-engineered to require the addition of oil, eggs, and water–simple enough to offer convenience worth paying for, but involved enough to allow the consumer to feel that she was still being creative. Commercial recipes–like the ‘classic’ green bean casserole–involved mixing together convenience foods into novel creations.

Artifacts that seem funny now–like elaborately molded Jell-O salads (“if you made a Jell-O mold, you had made a meal!” a lady who’d been a 50s housewife once told me) and like the Bedazzler speak to the unease with which we’ve entered a world where it’s possible to do very little for our own sustenance. How many of us farm, or make our own clothes, or even our own music and drama and entertainment, as most people have done most places throughout most of history?

If you don’t make your own clothes, Bedazzle them. If you make a dessert from a mix, then put it in a fancy mold with nuts and marshmallows and whatever else. And if you don’t have time to do whatever crafty-foodie-artsy thing you wish you had time/money/energy to do…you could always just hang around Pinterest, or SouleMama, or Martha Stewart.com, or whatever. Even the dream of creating is powerful.

Photo Credit Here.

So, anyway, when I rediscovered making things–something I’d loved as a child–it felt like part of me was awakened. It felt weirdly powerful to have knitting needles and know how to use them. I have to credit rediscovering craftiness with the re-discovery of my love for writing. Making things–from paper and pencil, fabric and fiber, flour and fat–felt powerful. If I could make something worth wearing/seeing/eating, maybe I could write something worth reading/hearing/pondering.

Here’s where it got tricky for me, though: online, the line between what’s inspiring and what’s discouraging can be blurry, and I can only think it’s because of the careful edits. Ann Voskamp surely gets mosquito bites out there in God’s gorgeous creation. The most peaceful, attachment-parenting crunchy mamas get angry, pop in a DVD, and call for take-out, they just don’t write/photograph/blog those stories.

There’s a reason blogs like CakeWrecks and Awkward Family Photos (the anti-Pinterest and anti-Instagram!) are also popular: they bless us with the truth that everyone and everything is sometimes–even often–as messed up as we (and our families, and the stuff we try to make) are. They offer us the promise that even the screwiest of screw-ups can be redeemed into something, even if it’s just the sacrament of laughter.

We love Pinterest and the like because we’re creatures created to create, and creating feeds something in us that demands to be fed. But not all creations–certainly not the most important ones–can be photographed, pinned, blogged, or otherwise ‘sold.’ They are the ones that open us to ourselves, to each other, to God, and to the world, in thousands of visible and invisible ways: the tears dried with a gentle touch, the I’m sorry whispered with sincerity, the love that covers every flaw even if only for a few fleeting seconds.

At the end of it, all of our making strives toward this. Command + C those moments, and pin them in your heart.

The Newest Fad Diet VS. The Vegetable Volunteers

Posted on by under autumn, children, Faith, Family, Gardening, Grace, north fork, long island

Well, WOW. I would not have guessed that yesterday’s post about a wacky fad diet would’ve garnered so many page views. But it did, and I can’t help but wonder why. I rather hope it is because people are looking for a reason not to follow the latest “should & ought” from the newest guru. Nearly every day, it seems, someone tells me of some new approach to eating or not-eating or exercising or not-exercising and all I can say is this:

If I were still in the grip of disordered thinking and behavior surrounding food and body, the Internet would be a living hell. HCG diet! “The Plan”! “Paleo”! The Primal Urge Diet! HELP!

And yet? And yet–there is this:

My compost pile. An occasionally smelly, sometimes-ugly, always buggy home to the biggest, juiciest worms on the North Fork. The place where the scraps from our table become the food for next year’s food. Nothing goes to waste here. It takes care of two big problems:

What to do with trash?

and

How to fertilize the garden?

in one easy move. In this pile go the eggshells, coffee grounds, burned slices of toast, and forgotten leftovers. Here’s where I put the custard that didn’t come together quite right, the bread that went stale, and the yogurt that got moldy.

Here, everything, even the most putrid, vile stuff, is reborn into something new: dark, rich soil that feeds the garden and brings forth new life. And so it goes on.

And sometimes, there are unexpected graces:

This pretty little butternut squash grew from a forgotten seed discarded in the compost pile last autumn. There that little seed rested all winter until, come spring, it grew into a plant that bore another beautiful fruit.

In this ugly, forgotten corner of the garden (where the compost pile was located previously) a number of vegetables “volunteered”–they sprang forth from scattered seeds and persevered to bring something beautiful and edible and life-giving.

Oh, these little events–”random” butternut squashes, potatoes, and tomatoes growing from compost piles–don’t get much press, I know. But to me, they point beyond themselves to a story that’s much, much greater: it’s the story of beauty from ashes, a promise that somehow, the crazy, smelly, wasted and mixed-up bits and pieces of this world can be transformed, redeemed, into something that’s at once totally different from and organically connected to what’s come before.

Yes, indeed. There are glimpses of grace within and among and emerging from the confusing bits and pieces of this life, and they are worth holding onto.

Speaking Out, Part One

Posted on by under anorexia, Bible, Dieting, Emotional Eating, Family

{I’m away this week. In addition to the delights of being with family & friends, I had the opportunity to speak to a MOPS group in New Jersey. I’m going to share some of the talk with you here. If I get my tech stuff together, I might even go all fancy and post it as a podcast so you can hear my squeaky little voice.}

So, I’ve struggled with how to organize this talk because I feel like there are two sides of me that I bring together in my writing, and each one is the “real me.” The first side is the person who likes to tell stories and to find the humor in things. The second is the geeky side that likes to read and research things and find facts. Sometimes I’m able to strike a balance between the informing and fact finding and the story-telling, sometimes, I lean too far to one side or the other. So I hope that today our time together can have some of that balance.

What I would like to talk about today is food. Specifically, eating together as families. More specifically, how central and shaping and important that can be in your life and your child’s life. I happen to think that how we view food tells us a lot about how we view ourselves. How we relate to our families. Even how we relate to God.

I grew up a Christian, with a pastor for a dad to boot, but my mom is Jewish. And I don’t know how well you might know the Jewish stereotypes, but we are a people that have a notorious love for eating and for worrying. So, you know, the little gatherings of my mom and her best friends (Jews, too, by the way) involved bagels, and cream cheese, and lox, or Danish pastries and coffee, or Chinese food, or whatever, but it’s like, here are all these women, different sizes, different shapes–and they’re enjoying their food, but at the same time, they’re worrying. They’re like, punishing themselves for eating. Like, “this is great, but I shouldn’t be eating it, I’m fat” or “I’ll take JUST A SLIVER of that cheesecake” or eating two different kinds of cake while insisting on Sweet N Low and skim milk for their coffee–not because they like it that way, but because they’re “cutting calories.”

I was quite a thin child. And it wasn’t like I tried to be that way. Actually, I’ve always loved food. And I didn’t think of my body as something that I had “shaped” in anyway, because, you know, kids tend not really to think like that. But always, always, I was aware of one big thing: when you got to be a grownup (or at least, more grownup, you had to punish yourself over the food that you ate. Calories were BAD. Fat was BAD. Even seemingly harmless BREAD and PASTA became BAD. I would eat whatever I wanted, sure, and stayed thin, probably because that’s just how I was. But older women would tell me: “just you WAIT. when you get OLDER you won’t be able to EAT LIKE THAT.”

I began to think that I was something like a self-inflating life jacket. You know, the kind where you pull a valve or something on this flat thingy and slowly but surely it, you know, inflates? I was just kind of waiting for a valve to blow and suddenly I’d have a body that I’d hate, because pretty much all the grown up women I knew hated their bodies, or, at the very least, didn’t like them and beat themselves up over them and did weird things with food and diet. I mean, I even kind of wondered not whether but WHEN I would start going to Weight Watchers meetings myself. (My mom had been a lifetime member.)

What happened next is not that interesting, just because it’s the story of disorder that’s, sadly, more normal than abnormal in our culture. I began to fear food, began to overexercise, just generally developed an obsession. And it had a kind of religious significance, because the Christian diet plans were making their rounds in those days. So I felt like I had to be “Slim for Him,” that there needed to be “More of Jesus, Less of Me,” that I had to “listen for God” to tell me what and whether to eat, and so on. I counted calories and fasted and “did penance” for my indulgences with exercise and, you know, pretty much punished myself for everything I ate. I can remember many days in high school when I’d get by on an apple for breakfast, a banana for lunch, with diet cokes in between, and then only at the end of the day allow myself to eat dinner, and I’d still be anxiously counting calories and figuring out how many sit-ups I still needed to do before bed.

I have to condense the story here, but I want to tell you two things that helped me get to the place I am now, which, admittedly is not perfect, but which is undoubtedly a much, much happier place, a place where I can have the occasional chocolate croissant with a cup of coffee with cream and not feel “dirty” or like I need to go run 6 miles to “get rid of it.”

And for you readers, you’ll just have to return to get the rest of the story…

Film Review: “The Help” and The Supper of the Lamb

Posted on by under Anticipating, Bible, Connecting, Faith, Films, Food, Joy, Justice

Last summer, I listened to the brilliant audiobook edition of The Help, and loved it so much that when I got to the end, I started again at the beginning.
So when I heard that a film version was in the works, I was terrified that it would be a disappointing botch-job of a book that moved me alternately to laughter and tears; stills and previews from the film made me fear that Hollywood would make the white woman (Skeeter, played by Emma Stone, no relation to me) the heroine in a story that, in so many ways, belongs to the black maids of Jackson, Mississippi. So often, film adaptations of books disappoint me by retaining a book’s external trappings and missing its spirit. (The Lord of the Rings, to me, does not capture the spirit of Tolkien’s books; by contrast, the Anne of Green Gables films change up L.M. Montgomery’s plot while retaining an essential Anne-ness.)

I was not disappointed. The filmmakers did a beautiful job of condensing all that I loved about The Help–no short novel at 544 pages–into two and a half hours of hilarity, heartbreak, and human drama. To my mind, a big part of what makes a successful adaptation is the degree to which the filmmakers are willing to take license with the story in order to tell it in a way that is particular to the medium of film. So instead of lengthy scenes demonstrating Skeeter’s deep relationship with the maid who raised her, Constantine (a remarkable Cicely Tyson), the film gives us brief glimpses–Constantine braiding Skeeter’s hair on the steps of her rundown house, Constantine’s old fingers touching the marks on her doorframe that have measured Skeeter’s growth over the years–visual impressions that powerfully evoke an intimate and loving relationship.

So much of the book (and the film) uses basic bodily functions to communicate both the shared humanity of and gulf of separation between blacks and whites in 1960s Mississippi. References to taming hair and clothes to meet societal expectations are pervasive, as are motifs and themes related to toilet functions. Present (but in the book, less emphasized) is the motif of food and the theme of shared eating. I’m particularly tuned in to food issues, of course, but there was no missing the way in which the film capitalized on images of shared and segregated eating and drinking. The black maids must take care of their physical needs furtively and shamefully–sneaking a bite of deviled egg on the sly–all the while pampering the appetites of their white employers. Hilly Holbrook (a smoothly hateful Bryce Dallas Howard), will gorge herself on the food cooked by her maid, Minnie (Octavia Spencer, who voiced the same character on the audiobook), but expects her to use a designated outdoor one–even during a tornado. The film portrays the shame and belittlement of this segregation in cinematic shorthand.

Octavia Spencer ("Minnie")

Where the film goes beyond the book (in its portrayal of food and eating), it aligns strikingly with my own understanding of a biblical theology of food. So much of food and eating, within the Bible, touches on issues of poverty, justice, community, and inclusion. In virtually every culture, sharing food non-ceremonially is an important indication of welcome and friendship; Jesus’ ministry emphasized the importance of eating with those who are different as a way of not just symbolizing—but, in fact actually practicing the kind of equality and unity that he proclaimed. Early Christian writers, too,  claimed that sharing life, including meals, with persons of different backgrounds was a “proof” of true Christian faith. So when the outcast “white trash” Celia Foote (an effervescent Jessica Chastain) drinks a cold Coca-Cola with Minnie, it’s a foretaste not only of the meals she’ll later insist on sharing with (and then cooking for) Minnie, but a foretaste, too, of the coming healing, reconciliation, and deep friendship that forms between Minnie and Celia, and Skeeter, Minnie, and Aibileen (a luminous Viola Davis).

And that’s a foretaste, too, of the heavenly banquet.

Jessica Chastain ("Celia Foote")

Living the gospel acknowledges our shared humanity and need for reconciliation with God and with each other. When we sit to eat together, we acknowledge our physical needs and that shared humanity (we all eat; we all excrete) while tasting just a bit of God’s graciousness. The Help reminds me again just how countercultural that Supper of the Lamb really is, and inspires me to look for ways to taste the firstfruits of that meal in my own life, right now. And that, as the preacher in the film says, takes self-sacrifice and a willingness to hear one anothers stories. But it’s also the only way to true relationships and genuine joy.

Fresco of an early church 'agape' (love) feast