Hello blog,
I am in a small examining room next to my 4 year old, in the middle of a 4 hour allergy test. We are enduring one final dose of peanut butter on wheat bread. Owen doesn't appear to love the taste of peanut butter, but it appears to agree with him from all health perspectives thus far. No hives, no throwing up (beyond gagging at the taste), no breathing issues.
So the probable outcome is that he will pass his peanut challenge and we'll move peanuts from "not allowed to eat" to "don't make me eat that" category. Yay.
But I'm here for the next two hours with Roy's little Chromebook, and Owen is happily engrossed in Animaniacs, so it seems like a good time to catch up. Here are some rambling thoughts...
1. Last night I cooked an amazing dinner. Like, it was first rate. I don't usually gloat (externally at least), but we decided to recreate the Wooed By Fried Chicken date night, and it was such an insight into how much we've improved in the kitchen. Everything was easier. I wasn't nervous about frying the chicken, I already knew how to pickle vegetables and make flaky biscuit dough and bake a browned-butter pretzel crust. I knew how to make a thick butterscotch sauce and how long to freeze a crust before slathering it in sauce, softened ice cream, and chocolate covered salted pecans. I knew how to time heating hot oil and how to assemble a cooling rack as a drip pan. (I also discovered that I've assembled some better equipment over the past four years.)
It was exciting to survey the table and have such a sense of "I owned that" instead of "is it going to taste OK?" And I enjoyed every single second of preparing it.
Roy and I thought it tasted mighty fine. The boys hated the salad, ate most of the chicken, were divided on the biscuits, and largely inhaled the dessert. James is a picky eater when it comes to sweets--I'll never understand--but Roy and I split his leftovers so I wasn't too offended.
It took us two years to cook our way through Date Night In, but last night reminded me that it's worth doing it all over again now that we've actually tasted it all and refined a bunch of techniques. Maybe pulled pork with apple slaw next week?
2. I want to be a college professor. when I grow up. This is a little omnipresent fire in the back of my heart, stoked through random circumstances, but always banked by little boys and work and life. I have to express gratitude to those who know of the teeny flame back there and let me roast a marshmallow every now and then. I was asked to substitute teach for an evening at Northeastern Seminary a few weeks ago. I was tasked with exploring the relationship between head pastor and worship director ("worship pastor" "worship arts director" "worship leader" "music director" etc etc etc). What ensued was a fascinating discussion of what worship actually means and how defining that one word as a head pastor can inform and direct such a crucial relationship among church leadership. It was so much fun. I felt like we barely scratched the surface, but were opening working our way through some critical information that informs how we worship as a community of faith--which is pretty important!
Who wants to fund my doctoral studies at the Institute of Worship Studies so I can form curriculum at RWC and NES to continue this discussion?!?
3.. Rachel Held Evans died and I'm not OK. Reading Rachel's journey and her insights often causes me to stop breathing. I will sit there, book in hand, in stunned shock at how profound her insights are and how perfectly she has expressed my insecurity and doubt. Eventually I will remember to blink, which restarts my breathing, and I reread the paragraph or sentence repeatedly, as if I don't trust its profundity.
RHE leaves her books and her blog and her writings for us to reread and draw encouragement from. But I think the lasting gift she left me is how well she LOVED. She loved everybody. She loved people who doubted, of course. But she also loved, equally well, those who lived the lives of the blessedly assured. In this season of life I find it extraordinarily difficult to love the evangelical church--mostly because I don't think they love like Jesus very well. But Rachel loved them--even when she didn't agree with them (especially when she didn't). I love listening to her--on podcasts and interviews. Her voice is warm and conveys kindness, gentleness, and a wicked sense of humor. She was somebody I would want to hang out with, even if she hadn't ever published a word.
So RHE has died and I'm not OK. I'm wrestling with the unfairness of a young father raising two little babies on his own. I'm angry with the comments I've read from blessedly assured people that she's burning in hell because she loved gay people. I'm disheartened to remember that there are people, from my own upbringing, who would claim that she was "called home early because she wasn't following the Lord." But then I remember how much she loved, and how much Jesus loved in parallel circumstances, and I am checked.
How can we love better?
Clearly I am in a doctors'-room-induced state of deep contemplation. Need more ice cream pie...
