A Few Thoughts...

1. I read this blog post about a U of Chicago law prof, who makes $450k per year, worrying about how he's going to make ends meet if Obama raises his taxes.  It was a little absurd, though heaven knows I'm not a "rich guys should pay more taxes 'cause they're richer than me" person.  The outrage in the comments was predictable.

Makes me wonder, though, whether those outraged people have thought about how our worrying about food must look to people in this country and others who don't even have food that is safe, or enough food.  I bet there is someone, somewhere, wishing they could afford a dozen eggs who reads some of this chatter about "local, fresh, organic" and thinks, "seriously? they're worried over whether the chicken who laid their eggs got to play outside, and for that they'll pay $12 per dozen?"

If you like to spend extra on fancy food as a hobby, more power to you, but I think being ashamed of eating like poor people is silly.  Most of the world is poor people, dang it.  I'm rich in that I get to choose what I'm going to have for dinner each night.  Do you realize how rare that is?  For most of history, it would have been a given that we'd have essentially the same thing every day (beans/corn, potatoes/cabbage/bacon, bread/cheese) plus whatever the garden was producing that week.

2. Sick kids who are too young for reason don't understand that the best thing for them is to lay still and recover.  They think you are being a big mean jerk to make them lay still and recover when what they really want is to run around and make their oxygen saturations drop like rocks and steal their siblings' toys.  Someday I am finally going to understand the messages that the Lord smacks me across the face with and realize that whenever God seems like a big mean Jerk, perhaps it's that I really am being as unreasonable as a croupy baby who won't go to sleep because he wants to eat a wristwatch.

(How's that for a confusing metaphor?)

3. There's nothing wrong with canned soup.

4. I can't hate NickJr too much, because they're about the only way I managed to keep both kids relatively death-free on Tuesday, but gee, I really hate the songs that get stuck in your head.  Like the one from the Backyardigans Zorro-librarian episode (which we have watched no fewer than 20 times in the last two days): "I'm going to get that book back/going to get that book/going to get that book back/going to get that book".  I can't get it out of my brain and am considering trying to remove it with an icepick, or failing that, listening to "Ice Ice Baby" until that gets stuck in my head.

5. Read a blog post on a pastor's blog about prayer life and what constitutes a "good" prayer life (can you tell I was reading a lot on the internet today, because you can read on the internet while a feverish child drapes himself across you to nap?).  Yes, all this stuff we've been learning about food and freedom and trusting God?  Well, it applies in the spiritual life too--there are only a few things that Christians are required to do, and most of the rest of the stuff we think is necessity is just... habit.

(Required: praying.  Habit: you have to keep a prayer journal where you write down your prayers, using the ACTS model to organize them.  And so forth.)

This isn't a cop-out, or a pass, with regard to food or spirituality--we're not going to sin more that grace may abound.  But it is a freedom for you to get with the Lord, study the Bible, and decide whether the typical way of doing things is really the way God built you to do them.  Remember my silliness, feeling ashamed because I have to memorize Scripture with songs meant for middle-schoolers?  Well, pooh to feeling ashamed.  I memorized it, didn't I?  Here's the second thing: maybe even memorization doesn't work for you, and that's ok.  Yes, I know David hid the Word in his heart in order to keep himself from sin.  That was David.  Maybe what God wanted for him was different from what God wants for you.  Almost certainly it was, in fact.

Memorizing Scripture is valuable and useful, but the moment it becomes something that sets me above other people or a task that distracts me from my relationship with the Lord, then it's just a habit and it might be time to let it go.

And now, enough talk, I'm going to bed.

Cheers,

Breanna