What’s worked for us: Brussels sprouts (!), lettuce, kale, green onions, tomatoes, peppers.
What’s been iffy: strawberries – year 1, broccoli.
What’s not worked: cauliflower.
Right now we’ve got tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and cucumbers in one bed (the one below), and lettuce, onions, strawberries, kale, green onions and spinach in the other. Here are some recent looks at how everything is growing!
And these are from a few weeks ago, in mid-April:
Hold on, friend.
When your dreams feel like old myths.
When you feel full to the brim with words words words.
When everything around you is growing.
When everything and everyone around you is decaying.
When your running on diet dr. pepper and bon bons.
When you’re feeling competent and powerful.
When you’re working late and tired of sitting, utterly fed up with that irony – that we computer-workers get tired by doing nothing physically all day.
When you just want to hide-away with a novel and some sunshine.
When you’re not getting what you want.
When you do get what you want and it turns out to be pretty ding-dang difficult.
When there’s so much pain and disappointment around you that you want to just wrap-up all the broken hearts in a blanket and rock them to rest.
When you’re off your game, and you can’t figure out why.
When you’re reading the Word faithfully.
When you’re staring at your closed Bible, wondering, who have you become?
When you’re doing ALL THE THINGS and it’s AWESOME.
When you’re doing ALL THE THINGS and it’s TERRIBLE.
When you’re feeling whiny and self-indulgent.
When you let someone down.
When you surprise and impress someone.
When your kitchen is a hot mess.
No matter what, whether the lists are long or short, the emotions high or low, the hopes broken or intact, hold on to the real-deal truth about you: you are made by God, and you are an image-bearer of God. God wants you, your actual messy self, in His family. Period. No matter what you’ve done or will ever do. Hold onto that.
—
(Related – finished The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness this week, which speaks to Christian identity and freedom in Christ. Review coming soon.)
Sometimes I need to hear and believe something so tangibly that I’ll write it down, hold it. When I feel crowded in by fear or hurt, I fall asleep clutching my tired pink Bible, the one with all the enthusiastic underlining that I did in college. The one that’s been across oceans and back, with buckets of tears soaked in the tissue-thin pages. Sometimes, we just need to clutch truth, grasp onto life-saving words.
Today love, hold onto this if you need to:
No season of your life is a waste.
Not a single solitary season. Not a single one.
Whole strings of days, swaths of them,
that felt like a total loss to us, or maybe just boring or blank,
I think that God’s deep and wide grace – His everlasting kindness,
His vast love for us, His knack for redemption in the face of hopelessness – can somehow, someday, redeem even those seasons, heal even those hurts.
I believe God can give us the unearthly gift of seeing what good, however small or tender or distant, was brought from pain.
If you’re in a bad or blank or unplanned string of days, feeling off-balance and a little wounded, grab onto this like a life-preserver: Father God sees you, sees this season, and none of it is a waste in His eyes. None of it.
May we have eyes to see the good in the unplanned, and may we have the spirit to accept that in others and in ourselves, a happy heart is still very much possible even in imperfect days.
—
“I will restore to you the years
that the swarming locust has eaten”
Joel 2:25
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good,
for those who are called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28
I just finished Shauna Niequists’s Bread and Wine. And honestly, it was delightful – equal parts light and serious. Pretty, honest prose, book-ended by simple, enticing recipes. It read like a friend sharing tips and stories, not like some fancy cook trying to show off their skills or glamorize their life. It felt like a sister, pointing you towards savoring life and inviting people in to join you.
Since I started Bread and Wine, I’ve caught myself eating slower, enjoying food more, not multitasking at meals anymore. I’ve found myself just doing one thing at a time, and I’m really grateful for that.
This morning, as Garret was on his way out the door to go fishing, I was still waking up, staggering around the kitchen looking for breakfast. He left, I turned the TV off and ignored my phone, and I settled in at our kitchen table with some Nutella toast, Bread and Wine waiting for me to cover the last few pages, and hazelnut coffee. (Instant hazelnut coffee, if I’m honest. I was feeling a touch lazy.)
Our kitchen is a decent-sized, L-shaped, linoleum-covered space, and in the corner by the window we have our little round table. It really only comfortably seats four or five, but I’d squeeze as many people around it as I could if it was only up to me. Garret isn’t on the same page with me there – the man doesn’t like to be crowded.
Last week I cooked Shauna’s go-to risotto recipe for the first time, along with roasted veggies and pan-cooked chicken. Y’all, both of us just about died from the yum.
Garret chopped sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and parsnips, while I followed every step of the risotto recipe to a T. I barely knew what risotto even was, so I was excited to maybe actually cook it myself! Garret loves flavor and gets excited about mixing seasonings, so he is in charge of seasoning things most of the time in our house. While he was seasoning the vegetables, lightly sprayed with butter, I put the chicken (marinated overnight in fresh lemon and lime juice, garlic, and apple cider vinegar) in a pan, with chopped peppers I’d pulled out of the freezer for a little color.
Cooking together is almost always fun, but this meal was rich and extra-good, and Garret looked at me like I’d solved a mystery of the universe when he took his first bite. We were both proud of how good our home-grown Brussels sprouts tasted, and we both ate the leftover risotto in record time over the next two days.
In Bread and Wine, Shauna shares that her heart for gathering people around the table is all about giving people a safe, welcoming place where they can rest and be fed, where we can all admit our humanity – that we need to slow down, we need friends and help, and we’re hungry.
We have a small, sweet group of friends that we have dinner with often, and once I saw how big of a hit the risotto and roasted vegetables were with Garret, I knew it’d work great for our little super club. So, we all got together a few nights ago, with pot roast, red wine, risotto, roasted sweet potatoes and broccoli and sprouts and parsnips, and Bluebell – blessed Bluebell – for dessert. It was a gooood night.
I can’t eat this rich, savory risotto quickly. I find myself holding my fork a little looser, relaxing and enjoying. Paying attention to all of it – the smells, the people, the tastes.
Shauna’s book isn’t a heavy or theological memoir but like her first two books, her vulnerability caught me, drew me in, made me really listen. I love that she invites us all to be honest about how God made us and what God made us to love – she loves to cook and entertain – her brother loves to sail and be at the lake.
I also enjoyed her practicality about food and people – that hospitality is about being present not perfect, about having a few go-to recipes, planning ahead a little, meeting people’s needs, and opening your door. I have a small house, small table, and almost-always-dirty kitchen floors, but I still found this book really helpful and practical.
One thing that I will note about Bread and Wine is that if you’ve read her other books and/or kept up with her blog, the order of events in this book’s essays may be a little confusing – it seemed to me that there was a little repetition and sometimes it confused me, but not bad. So, it’s a lovely collection of short essays, just like Cold Tangerines and Bittersweet, but this time with easy, delicious recipes. And can I just say? I love that her recipes are long and rambling – that’s how I write directions and recipes, too.
Bread and Wine was exactly what I wanted it to be – approachable, rich to the senses, heart-breaking at times, and hilarious. It reminded me to slow down and be present in tangible life, with friends and family, pots and pans, meat and vegetables.
*Disclosure: I was provided with an advanced reading copy of this book. But, the content of this review is my own opinion.
Last year, I really enjoyed writing about what 24 taught me, so I figured I’d take a go at again this year. My recent birthday was sweet and encouraging. Gratitude, messiness, freedom in Christ, working hard, settling into friendships, having fun with Garret, pressing on in creativity in my full-time work, continuing to grow with photography, and trying to live and communicate out of grace and freedom in Christ… this is where I’m at these days… as a 26 year-old.
Also? 26 just sounds weird. 25 sounded like fun. I’m having trouble getting it in my brain that I really am this age. It doesn’t feel old, but just… odd.
Being in your 30s looks appealing. It looks appealing because some days I just feel ready to be older and wiser, maybe not making the same ‘ol mistakes over and over again, maybe having a few things figured out.
I’ve written this list of what I’ve learned in the past year, but it’s just not the whole story. The whole story is that I have learned some by trying new things this year, but I’ve learned a ton by reading and listening and thinking – which has been great, I’m reading more books than I ever have before – but I’ve got this list and now I’m feeling convicted and pulled that this next year’s list? What 26 taught me? I need to learn those things by doing.
By loving through actions. By taking chances and trusting the Lord. By following rules that need to be followed. By traveling when possible. By really “making a go at” photography. By not procrastinating. By being mentally tough and faithfully doing difficult things. By practicing hospitality even with a small, messy house and a little stack of go-to recipes.
Not exactly sure about all that yet, but something along the lines of reading less, acting more is brewing…
So. That being said. This is what I think I know at 26. Many of these overlap with last year’s lessons learned. I’m a little slow on the up-take sometimes.
What 25 Taught Me
Like I said, this time next year, I want to be writing about lessons-learned from trying new things, creating more and consuming less, taking risks, loving well and big, and serving in new ways. I want to be surprised, again and again. I want to stay blazingly aware to this world and how God is moving and how He is changing me, you, us.
Here’s to another year learning and growing and changing.
What have you learned in your last year? Do you feel like you’re learning more by doing/creating or by reading/consuming?
Steadfast is my word for 2013, and I’m not exactly sure how I’ve been doing at it so far. I have noticed being tossed-to-and-fro less, chasing random ideas less, and focusing more on my main things – the things that truly matter and the things that fire me up, but I’m still a little slow on the uptake when it comes to self-discipline, logistics, and detail tasks.
I’ve been trying to collect little clues towards this. If my year’s aim is to better learn how to faithfully, steadfastly accept and serve where God has put me, then, if I know me, I’m going need to little tools and babysteps and tricks and reminders to keep moving towards that. If I want that 1 Corinthians 15:58 steadfastness in which I believe and walk in the truth that my labor is not in vain, then I need to keep learning, and I think the ways that I learn best are reading and doing and talking/writing it out.
“It’s possible to begin to believe that only the revolutionary pursuits require bravery.
But being brave also means waking up to your today responsibilities (no matter what they are) and then moving into them as the person you most fully are – with all of your unique desire, personality, and creativity.
Sometimes today will mean doing something risky or new. Most times it just means doing the same thing I did yesterday. Either way, the point is my life with Christ and his life in me.”
– Emily P. Freeman
Those words by Emily caught me off guard last week – waking up to your dailies and moving into them as you are, not as you think you ought to be. Still chewing on that.
And, these thoughts on strengths and weaknesses from Christine a few days ago have also stuck with me.
The trouble is we assign different values to various personality traits and abilities so, instead of simply being faithful with the strengths we’ve been given, we think we have to have every strength and no weaknesses or God can’t use us. And when we fall or a weakness comes through, we immediately say to ourselves, “I am a bad (fill-in-your-blank).”
What would happen, I wonder, if we embraced our strengths and our weaknesses? What if we didn’t try to push ourselves through our weaknesses but focused instead on being good stewards of our strengths?
… There’s freedom in that. And there’s freedom that because of the cross, because God sees Christ when He looks at us (if we are in Him), we are never a disappointment to the One who matters most.” – Christine Hoover
Freedom in Christ means freedom from the high expectations we burden ourselves with and freedom from the pressure to be good at ALL THE THINGS. Thank goodness.
I just recently finished reading Hard Optimism, and focusing on your strengths – walking in those well and really honing them, as well as getting help and systems for your weak areas in life, instead of trying in futility to turn them into strengths – was one of the twelve practices outlined in the book. Still chewing on that book as well. Lots of practical insights.
So, those are my rambling thoughts on how 2013 is looking so far. A lot of thinking, rambling talks with Garret, fun, planning, and babysteps. Here are some highlights from February and little babystep goals for March.
February recap:
March 2013:
How’s your year going so far? Any recent accomplishments – big, small, or tiny? List a few in comments and let’s cheer each other on. If you need someone to give you permission to brag on yourself, toot your own horn, etc., etc. here it is.
One of my least favorite parts of this season of life is that friendship takes a lot more work now than it used to. But I think I’ve learned that can be a good thing.
See, for most of college I lived in a big, old, creaky house full of girl friends, and it was just about the funnest thing I’d ever done up to that point. We were all believers, 90% of the time we all got along, we cooked and studied together, people and friends and boyfriends were over constantly, and half the time there was some kind of discipleship group or Bible study meeting in our living room. There was always someone around to talk to, and being able to pray with and cry with those dear friends is something I’ll always remember.
By the end of my few years in that house, I was so excited to get married and then start living with Garret. And now, almost three years later, he’s still my favorite roommate of all time. But also?
Maintaining, growing and starting friendships takes A LOT more work now! I miss seeing girl friends every day. I miss friendship and community being convenient. I miss silly, late nights studying and laughing together.
But I’ve also learned that friendship taking more effort is not a completely negative thing.
What have you learned about friendship in recent years?
