testosterone and words

I had to go to the first coaches meeting tonight since Jeremiah was at 180.   While I’m sure that this should have been a very normal event…I had to do the thing I dread.    Walk into a parking lot full of dads who eventually will be my competitors in a sea of boys in a game built by men.   Sometimes my female-ness feels all consuming.   I’m acutely aware that I don’t fit in.  I’m not the athletic jock kind of girl.  I don’t flirt.  I actually don’t talk to anyone.  My introversion takes over and I think about how I want to instagram this moment.   The last time this happened it was at a missions meeting for leaders in the Twin Cities.  Cue the wealthy old white man parade.  

Which leads me to one of my words for the year.  Here’s how it goes: 

Freedom – Psalm 139 i am made how God made me.  I will choose to be free of the labels that others put on me.   I will discover more freedom in Christ and rely on his definition of me rather than what i hear others say.

 

I sometimes struggle with how God made me.   And then I look to others to make me feel good.   I think there’s a part of me that want’s the good old boys to welcome me into their club.  But I don’t think that Jesus wants me in that club.   He want’s me in the “be thankful for who you are club”.

 

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because I can’t remember anything about a chocolate caramel love fest cake

I bake and cook.  Alot.   And I can’t remember which recipe is which.  So I’m hoping that a blog will help that.   a little Jesus.  a little food.   a little life.  Here’s something I made in 2009, for the first and last time

1 box devil’s food cake
1 small box instant choc. fudge pudding
1 cup sour cream
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs
1/2 cup warm water
1 packages caramels
1/3 cup cream
1 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Mix everything together except the last 3 ingredients.
3. Melt caramels and cream together in the microwave (follow melting instructions from the back of the package)
4. Grease bundt pan.
5. Pour half batter into bundt pan.
6. Pour melted caramel & cream on top of the batter.
7. Sprinkle chocolate chips on top of the melted caramel.
8. Cover with the remaining cake batter.

Bake for 50-55 minutes or until cake is spongy and toothpick comes out clean. Cool cake and then invert. Cover with *ganache (or chocolate frosting) and caramel sauce.

*ganache is just whipping cream and chocolate melted together. I like to use 9 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and 1 cup cream. Heat the cream, pour over chocolate and mix until melted and creamy.

dry bones and sloth

Reading “Still – Notes On A Mid-Faith Crisis” by Lauren Winner

Favorite quotes:

• Laziness may have been a problem for nineteen hundred years but not anymore.   Busyness is the new sloth.
• I am too busy to go to church, too busy to pray; there’s not enough time to pray, not enough time to hold body together, let alone soul.   Ii am too lazy to do what’s important, or hard, so I stay busy with everything else.
• Some days, even a direct word from the Lord doesn’t take.
• “you only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.”  The words slap.   Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God.  …it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward.
• (about Esther) This may be the only book where God is not named, she says, but God’s hiddeness is in fact shot all throughout the the Torah.   All throughout Torah, we find people looking for God and not finding God, because God doesn’t often conform to our expectations.   God is somewhere other than the place we think to look.   …If you look around the world and wonder where God has gone, why God isn’t intervening on behalf of just and righteous causes, your ver wondering may be a nudge to work in God’s stead.
• …because on principle, she invites in anyone who knocks on her door-
• dislocated exegesis, that is the practice of reading scripture in unexpected places, in places that might unsettle the assumptions you were likely to bring to the text.
• Like every other spiritual practice with which I have any acquaintance, it doesn’t always work, if working means producing startling insights or some sort of spiritual uplift.
• I carry Ezekiel’s promises in their voices around with me all year.    (Ezekiel 37:1-14 Dry Bones)
• “that is how my spiritual life has always moved,” she says, “like a Jewish day, from darkness then into light.”