Chicken

"Why is it that carrots, a simple root that you can just pull from the ground, cost more than a box of Twinkies, this incredible combination of food science and technology that has forty ingredients?” – Michael Pollan

“What we eat and how we eat it reflect whether or not we think we need to abide with others at all. When we thoughtlessly eat commodities alone and on the run, there is no time or place for abiding. But when we eat with a commitment to the strengthening of the ecological and social memberships that make food possible, then it becomes possible for eating to be an act of abiding with another.” – Norman Wirzba

 

In his book, Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating, Norman Wirzba does an excellent job of relating our theology to our consumption of plants and animals as food. He makes a lot of great points, but at the heart is the idea that our decisions about eating matter.

Now that the baby has begun eating solids, I've been thinking a lot about how I want our family to view food and eating. I've come up with a few things that are important to me.

1. Good food takes time.

I don't know very much about the Slow Food movement, but based on thirty seconds of internet research, I see that it was started to oppose the opening of a McDonald's in Rome. It is described as an alternative to fast food (makes sense). 

What I do know is that the best meals start in the garden or at the butcher shop or farmer's market. They begin with real ingredients grown and harvested by real people, sold by real people, and prepared by real people (that last real person is usually me).

Side note: my best season of cooking happened when I lived in a house with three other people and a few regular visitors. We often had a team of four or five cooking dinner together. If I could find a way to make it happen, I would cook every meal with a team. Good food doesn't take as much time when more people are working together to prepare it.

Garden tomatoes about to become soup

Not only should food take time to prepare, it also takes time to eat. You don't scarf down food as quickly as possible if you spent hours tending a garden to grow it; you savor it, appreciating the sweet juiciness of fresh tomatoes and the crisp, earthy taste of lettuce. Someone invested a lot of time into all the food we eat, and all meals should be savored as though we grew the food ourselves.

2. Good food doesn't have to be expensive. 

Everyone wants organic food these days, but a lot of people are put off by the price. Some produce is almost double the price of conventionally grown produce. However, according to the Leopold Center for Agriculture (via this website), the average carrot travels 1,838 miles from farm to table. Growing up in rural Indiana, some of the produce I ate traveled approximately 100 feet from my mom's garden to the table. Or less than ten miles, from a produce stand to my house. 

Unfortunately, much of it also traveled as far as the average carrot. According to Barbara Kingsolver, in her excellent book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the United States exports as many potatoes as it imports every year. So the farms around me in Indiana were sending their food to Japan while the grocery stores were buying their food from Chile.

Rather than spending a lot of money on organic food that is produced halfway around the world, I think our money should be spent on local food that should be cheaper because of the much lower production costs. If this food is produced organically, all the better, although I have been disappointed to learn more about the strict criteria and expensive process used to classify food as organic that my own garden probably doesn't meet.

On the other hand...

3. Good food isn't cheap.

At the other end of the spectrum are the bargain hunters. If milk from a local dairy comes in a glass bottle that requires a two dollar deposit at the time of purchase, then they will buy the cheaply packaged milk from two states away. If locally grown strawberries are twice the price of strawberries from California, then they will choose to save a few dollars and accept a dramatic reduction in quality.

Multi-colored lettuce growing in the garden

Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any other country in the world. My husband and I have made the choice to eat less meat but to buy higher quality meat. We also try to buy local produce as often as we can. In general, I am trying to retrain my thinking on how to make good spending decisions when it comes to food. Living on a budget means we can't just buy the highest quality of everything we want. Rather than sacrificing quality, I am trying to learn to make other sacrifices like buying less food, not buying food out of season, and making more things myself.

We have also chosen to eat out only a few times a month so that when we do eat out, we can choose higher quality restaurants over deceptively cheap fast food.

4. Don't throw stuff away.

Americans throw away 40 percent of their food. I have to admit, I enjoy cleaning out the refrigerator. Unlike other parts of the house, I have never agonized over whether that moldy piece of meat has sentimental value, whether my grandchildren might want to reminisce over the time their grandparents had steak for dinner back in 2013, or whether my husband will come home to find that I have accidentally thrown away a family heirloom. 

When my husband and I were newlyweds, however, cleaning out the refrigerator became heartbreaking. I bought things thinking he would eat them. He bought things thinking I would eat them. For a few months, it seemed like we were throwing away more than we were eating! I realized how easy it is to make impulse purchases and then casually toss them in the garbage when they have exceeded their shelf life. We are a lot more conscientious now, and I want our son to grow up recognizing the value of food, the gift that it is, the great lengths it took for it to arrive in our kitchen, and our responsibility as stewards to care for what we have.

Chicken

In Dorothy Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness, (an excellent book not at all about food), she wrote that her daughter attended a school focused on practical knowledge. One of her classes taught her how to prepare the cheaper cuts of meat. That caught me off guard. Dorothy Day was born in 1897. I assumed that it was only recently that people had to take classes to learn about things that it seems like all of our grandparents knew. I realized that if Dorothy Day had to intentionally educate her daughter on food preparation, there was no shame for me to acknowledge my ignorance and start learning too.

My proudest accomplishment so far is learning to cook a whole chicken. Here is my recipe from Jamie Oliver's website:

1 chicken

carrots

celery

1 onion

dried rosemary

1 bay leaf

a few peppercorns

salt

a few cloves of garlic

1. Put the chicken in a large pot and cover with water. Add the vegetables and spices.

2. Bring it to a boil and then simmer for an hour and twenty minutes.

3. Eat, add to recipes, let cool and shred to use later.

The broth can be poured through a strainer and frozen for later use.

Chicken and broth in the freezer, ready to go!

I want our son to see his parents making intentional, responsible choices about the food we eat everyday. I want him to avoid the epidemic that is leading to obese children with nutrient deficiencies because their diets contain so many sweets and so few nutrient-rich foods. I want mealtimes to be enjoyable for our family. I think we are off to a good start, but we can do a lot more!

Sweet potatoes are yummy!

Choose Life

"Now choose life so that you and your children may live." - Moses

"I have come that they may have life and have it to the full." - Jesus

Since we've been married, my husband and I have debated the issue of abortion a number of times. He can't understand why anyone would be in favor of abortion. I've tried to explain that people who are pro-choice don't just favor killing babies willy-nilly and that it's more complicated. His questions have helped me think more about my own views. This blog is more or less a summary of what I've been thinking.

Focus on the Family
When I was fresh out of college, I went to visit a friend who was attending the Focus on the Family Institute for the summer. The day I was visiting, students were able to choose a department to learn more about. My friend had chosen the political arm of the organization. I remember sitting around a table in a conference room with a few other students and the head of the organization. He talked about important issues facing our country, one of which was abortion. When our chance to ask questions came, I asked him what they were doing to support families who may be statistically more likely to have an abortion. He said that was not their concern. I remember thinking, "But you work for Focus on the Family. Shouldn't you be focusing on families?"

I don't need to bash Focus on the Family. They have published lots of good material over the years. (Shout out to Adventures in Odyssey!) But the man's response highlights what I see as one of the biggest problems in the debate about abortion. We separate the "issue" from actual people.

As my husband and I began comparing stories of women we actually knew who had abortions, the stories were heartbreaking. A fifteen-year-old high school freshman who didn't want to give up her future and a Christian teenager pressured by her pastor whose son was the father of the baby. Neither of these girls should have been pregnant (or having sex) in the first place, but they did and they were and found themselves facing the prospect of abortion in very difficult circumstances.

But what could pro-life organizations offer them? Neither girl could ever retrieve the life she had lost. I'm sure that for both of them, abortion seemed the closest thing to erasing the past and starting over.

Pikuach Nefesh
In Judaism, the concept of Pikuach Nefesh is the idea that most of Jewish law can be set aside if a life is at stake. In other words, if saving a life requires breaking a commandment, Jews are required to choose the life over the commandment.

As I think about the stance the church has taken on abortion, I can't help but think about the lives of the ones who live. I think about families whose sons have few job prospects and little hope for the future. The successful ones might join the army or find a low-paying blue collar job. The others end up in jail or dead.

I think about their daughters who don't have adequate health care now and if they get pregnant, no hope of adequate childcare after the baby is born. If the mother and the baby survive the pregnancy in good health, what's next for them? I recently read an article entitled "The Hell of American Day Care" about the inadequacies of daycare in our country. Under-regulated and overpriced, fewer and fewer parents can afford the kinds of day cares that you see on tv, where kids play in brightly-painted rooms with lots of foamy educational things.

Furthermore, as I lay in bed at night in our house just down the street from one of the busiest emergency rooms in the city, I listen to sirens all night long. Where are they going? To victims of domestic violence, to victims of shootings and stabbings in drug and gang-related violence, to children suffering from inadequate nutrition and preventable diseases, to elderly people in run-down housing for whom extreme heat or cold are life-threatening conditions.

Is this the life that so many people are "pro"? Girls who are way too young and way too scared to be pregnant; children whose hopes for the future go no further than surviving to adulthood; parents who are working long hours to make a better life for the children and to avoid the fate of their own parents, who are languishing in cheap apartments and poorly-run adult-care facilities. 

Choose Life
I think it is time for Christians to follow the example of Judaism and to choose life without exception. We are called to care for widows and orphans, not just unborn children. We are called to love our enemies, and it might be that the way we talk about our enemies indicates our thoughts about "sinners," whether they are terrorists or unwed mothers.

If a woman who found herself with an unplanned pregnancy knew that the church was a place where she could expect to find people who choose life, she might expect to find help with medical bills (choosing life for her), low-cost daycare options (choosing life for her child), job-training and education assistance (choosing life for her family), and community (not just life, but life to the full).

An obvious solution for people who don't want a child is to stop having sex. In a culture lacking in closeness and community, sexual intimacy is often a cheap substitute for the lifelong intimacy we are created for. Again, if the church was full of people living life to the full, people might find the intimacy they crave in the church without turning to sexual relationships.

Maybe my thoughts are too idealistic, simplistic, or overly-optimistic, but I am tired of listening to people decry the murder of unborn children and yet turn a blind eye to the mass murder of born children through abuse and domestic violence, human trafficking, malnutrition, preventable diseases, hopelessness, depression, and all the other things faced by so many children who do manage to make it into the world.

It's a lot easier to be against abortion than it is to be pro-life.

Choose life. Pikuach nefesh.

Habit

"Ethics is not about being clever in a crisis but about forming a character that does not realize it has been in a crisis until the ‘crisis’ is over." - Samuel Wells

"[Conventional ethics] is trying to make a better world without us needing to become better people. - Stanley Hauerwas

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle

Last summer, Michael and I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book, Outliers, over a couple of road trips. (It took us a long time to get through the book. We're very slow listeners.) Gladwell's book is about what makes some people outstanding in their fields. Among other factors was 10,000 hours practicing. The Beatles played crazy long hours in clubs in Germany. Bill Gates spent countless hours programming. Before they were ever successful or famous, they practiced for hours and hours and hours.

I like what Samuel Wells says about shaping character in people. He writes that traditional ethics focuses on the point of decision, the ethical quandary, the moral dilemma.  The character of the person making the decision doesn't matter; the "right" decision is defined independent of such a sketchy variable as a person's character.

Theological ethics, on the other hand, is all about shaping people first. People make lots of decisions every day, some big, some little. People shaped according to the pattern of the cross make those decisions according to the pattern of Scripture, often without even realizing they are doing so.

This is both challenging and reassuring. On the one hand, we're never off the hook, able to coast until we find ourselves in a crisis; rather, we must be faithful in the small things everyday. On the other hand, the crisis itself is not so daunting when we have already defined our values and ways of thinking about the world.

It is tempting in ethical discussions to focus on big questions like euthanasia, cloning, and war.  However, it is how we treat our families and friends that shapes how we treat our enemies.  It is how we spend our time that shapes how we view the gift of life. It is how we view our own and others' bodies that teaches us how to talk about cloning and abortion. It is how we eat our dinner that shapes our view of farming, sustainability, and good ecological practice. It is how we spend our money that defines our economy.

As Christians, we often focus on more traditional spiritual disciplines like Scripture reading and prayer. These practices instill the patterns of worship in our lives, but all of the decisions we make reflect our allegiance--to the kingdom of God or the kingdom of the world. Scripture reading and prayer help us to learn the values of the kingdom of God, but so does careful attention to the many other choices we make on a daily basis.

Michael Pollan talks about the benefits of eating local food, 

which is a great choice to make.

Too Much Glee

There was once a man who loved a beautiful woman but thought himself too ugly to win her.  The man went to a mask maker to ask for a mask to hide his ugliness.  After transforming his appearance, the man won the heart of the woman, and they were married and living happily when the man, not wanting to continue in his deception, decided to have the mask removed.  When he returned home, his wife did not react at all to the appearance of his face.  He looked in the mirror and discovered that he had become handsome.  He returned to the mask maker to ask what happened.  The mask maker explained, “You have changed.  You loved a beautiful person.  You have become beautiful too.  You have become beautiful through loving her.  You become like the face of the one whom you love.” - Paraphrased from Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics by Samuel Wells

My friend Clara wrote a lovely poem about her desire to share her joys with her little girl. The poem is here. I highly recommend reading it.  In fact, if you don't have very much time, just stop reading now and go read her poem.

Her words caused me to stop and think about the things I fell in love with as a kid and how I want to share them with little Amos.  However, as Samuel Wells' story illustrates, we become like the face of the one we love, and unfortunately all too often, I mostly focus on playing games on my iPhone and watching episodes of Glee on tv.  There is room in my life for games and Glee, but I want the way I spend my days to reflect the things I love and want to teach Amos to love too.

I'm finding this blog to be cathartic in a way.  In the last four years, I have taken in a lot of information in the form of theology, ethics, biblical studies, etc.  As I look at the books on my bookshelf, words and phrases spring to mind. These 4x6, half inch rectangles have changed my life. They have changed the way I understand the world. I especially fell in love with the rich history of the church.

I don't have any plans to start Amos in on a heavy dose of theology, but I do want to convey to him a passion for learning and doing something with what you learn.  Even if I'm only writing for my mom and my friend Tracy (Hey, Mom!  Hey, Tracy!), I spend a lot of time thinking about what I will be writing here, and I want that thought to be directed towards things that I love, towards the words and ideas that have shaped me in the past few years and that I want to continue to shape me in the years to come.

So expect a lot more theological writing here!  Because I want what I look like to be a lot more in that general direction and lot less in the direction of a certain musical teen drama on Fox.

Amos loves Squishy Turtle and Friends

Love and Marriage

"The chance of a first marriage ending in divorce over a forty-year period is 67 percent." - John Gottman

A few years ago, one of my co-workers and I agreed: people who get married are either wildly optimistic or just plain stupid.  I am, of course, married now, and my co-worker seems to be headed in that direction.  But we also agreed that if and when we got married, it would only be because we managed to set aside our cynicism for a few weeks or months (depending on how long the whole process took).  Falling in love helped, for sure, but now I find myself irrevocably, permanently married.  Or at least that's the hope!

The couples in the small group that my husband and I lead have all been married between two and seven years.  We all agree that we've managed to skate by relatively unscathed so far, but now it's time to really put some effort into figuring out how to be successful (and happy) in the long run.

At the suggestion of a few different counselor/friends, we have decided to lead the group through The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman.  The book seems really good, and it is also encouraging because I think we are doing some things right.  The scariest part of the book is reading some of the conversations that play out between husbands and wives.  It is unbelievable how harsh some relationships are!

All that to say, even though I am very happily married to an amazing man, I can still understand the feelings behind the song below by Stephen Sondheim, and probably quite a few people could stand to acquire a little cynicism that might drive them to books like John Gottman's before they get to the point of some of the couples he cites who are on the brink of disaster!

This is one of the best performances ever on the television 

show, Glee, which although morally sketchy, 

has some of the best remakes.

A Covenant Prayer

"I am no longer my own, but Yours.

Put me to what You will,

Rank me with whom You will.

Put me to doing,

Put me to suffering.

Let me be employed by You or laid aside for You,

Exalted for You or brought low by You.

Let me have all things,

Let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things to Your pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

You are mine, and I am Yours.

So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

Let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen."

 - adapted from John Wesley's Covenant Service 

(taken from Sing to the Lord, #484)

I'm always looking for things to write about on my blog, and yesterday I knew I had to write about the words of a good friend.  He and his wife are headed today to the Mayo Clinic to find out if the frequent seizures he's been having will require brain surgery or can be controlled with medication.  I asked him how I could pray, what the ideal outcome was.  I was expecting his response to be about the details of his treatment, but he said, "I want to be able to respond to God's call on my life."

He has some specifics in mind.  He wants to be able to resume classes at seminary, to return to work, to be the husband he wants to be, to support his wife.  More than anything, though, I think he wants to move past this period of being almost completely incapacitated for any kind of work.  Even social interaction is exhausting for him and has to be limited to short periods of time.

In my own life, I've been hoping and praying for some time now that my church will allow me to participate in the creation of some rather extensive discipleship curriculum they have been working on.  Previously, I was hoping for a paying job, but now I've decided that even working as a volunteer would give me a project to work on and some great people to work with.  However, I talked to the pastor in charge of developing the curriculum yesterday, and he said that I might possibly be able to get involved sometime before the end of the year.  Well, it's June now, so I probably need to accept that I won't be participating any time soon.

The words of John Wesley have given me strength over and over again, especially the phrase, "Let me be employed by You or laid aside by You."  I find myself again not employed in the manner toward which I have been working for so long.  Like my friend, I just want to be able to respond to God's call on my life.

As my friend and his wife travel to Minnesota today for a difficult and scary few weeks of testing and working with doctors, I am praying for not only the restoration of his physical body, but also the restoration of his ability to participate fully in the work God has called him to.  I pray that both he and his wife would find peace in freely and heartily yielding all things to God.

And as I begin a new week of motherhood and wifehood (?), I pray that God would renew in me the strength of the covenant I have made by saying, "I am no longer my own, but Yours."  I pray that God would show me how to live faithfully where I am right now and, like my friends, freely and heartily yield all things to God.

My favorite of my friends' engagement photos - check out that spider web!

(Photo taken by Forest Fisk)

Save the Cheerleader, Save the World

"It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses." - Dag Hammarskjold

For the past day and a half, I've been reading the second book of The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire.  The main character, Katniss, is the hero of the story, but she only ever has one goal in mind: to protect her younger sister Prim.  Reading the second book, I am struck by the power of one person's love for another.  Katniss never intended to ignite a revolution or start a movement.  But her love for her sister, lived out for the whole country to see, was the only force strong enough to stand up to the all-powerful Capitol.

Another quote comes to mind from the movie, The Last Station, which portrays the end of Leo Tolstoy's life.  His wife Sofya says, "I am the work of your life, you are the work of mine.  That's what love is!"  Tolstoy's disciples want to make him an icon, a figurehead for their religious devotion to his ideals.  It is what Sofya says, though, that makes him great: his love.

In our world of mass communication, the draw of focusing one's life around communicating with a large audience is sometimes irresistible.  Whether one's message is in the form of a televised sermon, a blockbuster film or a 160-character tweet sent to a thousand followers, communicating with lots of people at once is deceptively simple.  But the larger the number reached by a message does not indicate the power of its impact.  While mass communication has its place, it is the love of one person for another that changes the world.

It seems that every time I come across this message, it is new.  I think of the young, idealistic me who graduated from college, wanting to change the world.  It feels like I have accomplished so little since then.  I think of my friends who also graduated with such lofty ambitions.  So many of us have found ourselves discouraged by our inability to flip the world on its head.

Katniss Everdeen is reminding me, though, that the world doesn't change overnight.  Loving one person or a few people and shaping one's life around giving yourself completely to them is how the world changes.  Sometimes that love happens to reach a wide audience; other times it is contained to those by whom and for whom it is given.  I doubt that anything I do will reach a wide audience, but if it does, I hope that it is first defined by love.

The Last Station trailer

A Sunny Evening

He sang to himself, "What shall I do 
With this life that thrills me through and through!
Glad is so glad that it turns to ache!
Out with it, song, or my heart will break!"
 - George MacDonald

Today started out a little rough.  The baby woke up at 4:30 this morning.  When the sun came up, it revealed another gloomy, rainy morning.

But after moms' group, a little Catching Fire, a nap, and some quality evening time with the boys, I have a much better outlook on the world.

George MacDonald's book, There and Back, is something of an apologetic story.  I believe that the main character will eventually become a Christian in large part because of his love of nature.  Throughout the book, the author has all kinds of beautiful descriptions of the natural world.

This evening was another perfect spring evening.  After the rain this morning, everything smells fresh and clean.  The grass is green.  The sky is clear.  We sat outside for a bit and enjoyed our back yard.  It is evenings like this that make rejoicing in the Lord always, as Paul suggests, a very easy task.

Checking out the leaves

On the Edge

"How can Jacob survive?  He is so small!" - Amos 7:2

"Two are better than one,
    because they have a good return for their labor: 
 If either of them falls down,
    one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
    and has no one to help them up.
 Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
    But how can one keep warm alone?
 Though one may be overpowered,
    two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken." - Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

"Suddenly I realized - two people isn't enough. You need backup.  If you're only two people, and someone drops off the edge, then you're on your own. Two isn't a large enough number.  You need three at least." - About a Boy

My poor hubby was sick all last week, and it really got worse over the weekend.  I went to bed Saturday night overwhelmed by the precariousness of our family.  In About a Boy, Marcus likens the web of relationships in our lives to acrobats in a pyramid. He says that it doesn't matter so much who is in your pyramid so long as you find someone else to take their place before they go away.

Our family is a very unstable pyramid right now. There is only a mommy and a daddy and a baby, and the baby doesn't really carry his weight.  When the mommy or the daddy gets into trouble, the whole thing starts to topple.

Fortunately, the nice people at the urgent care clinic were able to help Mike and prescribe him some good medicine, so he is feeling much better today, and our pyramid feels much stronger. We were able to come back from the edge.

I was reminded this weekend of two things:

1) when I don't make healthy choices, it effects more than just me.  Little things like eating well, getting enough sleep, and exercising are important in maintaining the health of our pyramid, and

2) we need to keep up the hard work of integrating more people into our pyramid.  It isn't easy to coordinate activities, prepare our house for guests, invest in other people's lives, and everything else that comes with having close friends, but not having close friends is even more difficult.

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.  Imagine how strong a cord of five or ten strands is!

Check out these crazy human pyramids!