Sunday cooking

I got a lot of cooking done today :)

New try-Bacon wrapped fish with pesto. It really is quite easy. I made the avocado pesto that is absolutely delicious, and completely something I can have, then just put some on one side of the tillapia, and wrapped two slices of turkey bacon around it. The recipe I found said to fry one side, then flip them and put the pan in the oven. Since I don't have an oven safe frying pan, I just put them in a glass baking dish. I imagine they might have turned out slightly better if left in the pan, because the baked side didn't turn out nearly as pretty as the fried side, but they should still taste great!

Aren't they pretty?

In addition to that, I made gluten free, egg free, turkey meatballs. They taste delicious, and again, no forbidden ingredients! Sadly, I don't have a picture of what they look like, because I put them in the crock pot to add meat to my boiled dinner before I thought about taking one, but they do look and taste amazing! I tweaked the recipe some, because I left out the arugula, and didn't cook them in tomato sauce at all, but the results were delightful! :) They were pretty east to make too, so I'm pretty sure I'll be making them again :).

Experimental success

Finally an experiment with coconut flour that worked! (Aside from the carob chip cookies that is. Those worked perfect :D) I've been trying to come up with something I can eat for breakfast that consists of more than fruit and turkey bacon. The past couple of weeks, I've tried a derivative of either waffles or pancakes, but since all the recipes I've found require eggs, and substituting bananas or applesauce just didn't seem to cut it, all I wound up with was basically a mess, and wasted (very expensive) ingredients. Then I realized, the coconut flour eggless recipe for cookies tells has me bake them. So maybe baking something is the answer. Introducing banana bread. It doesn't taste quite like normal banana bread, and it is far more dense, but it worked! It hold together, and I can eat it in slices like you're supposed to! :D The recipe is below. I tweaked the one I found online a little bit, so this is the tweaked version. You can find the original here (if you can eat rice flour, I'm sure it turns out a little better than mine did.)

Just over 1/2 tsp powdered stevia  (or 3/4 cup sugar)

1/2 cup olive oil

2 eggs, or an extra banana (I used the extra banana)

4 mashed bananas (so technically 5 bananas total if you use the extra banana instead of the eggs)

1/4 cup (roughly, I stopped measuring after I added 2 Tbsp, and just added more as I thought it needed it)

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 cup coconut flour

Pre-heat oven to 350, cook for 40 minutes. And there you go!

 It doesn't rise at all, and it's very thick, like dough you would roll, instead of batter, so I just pressed it into my loaf pan. Basically, once it's in the pan, that's the amount of bread you're going to get. It also has sort of a slightly uncooked, doughy texture even after it's done cooking, but believe me, if you leave it in until the middle seems all the way cooked, it's going to be seriously burnt on the outside.

Head and heart

I'm an Orange/Blue. I like people, I'm "free spirited," I do things without a plan, usually whenever I want to. I'm slightly hairbrained, I'm ADD, but I'm responsible. And lately I've been frustrated. I read a book a couple of years ago called "Girl meets God." It's the story of a woman who was raised Jewish and how she came to know Christ, but mostly it chronicles how in the span of one year she reconciled her jewish upbringing with her Anglican beliefs.

This was the book that made me start to consider whether or not I should continue going to an evangelical church, what I was raised with, or try something more traditional, like an anglican church. My brother and sister, and their spouses/children are anglican, so in my mind it wasn't a huge leap for me to make the transition. I hemmed and hawed for about a year before I finally made up my mind to go. I went first to a mid week service, met the priest, and really liked what I saw. His background was exactly what I needed if I was actually going to make the transition. He was raised baptist, became a Presbyterian pastor, and finally an Anglican priest. He knew exactly what I was struggling with, and because of that was able to answer my questions in, I felt, a more satisfactory way than someone else might have been. So I switched churches. This one was so much closer anyway, it was just a lot easier to go on a sunday morning. And I liked the constant switching of activities that takes place during the service. Stand and sing, then kneel to pray, then sit during the sermon, then kneel, stand, kneel. It held my attention better than most baptist services because I didn't have to stay focused for more than 30 min on any one thing.

Then I moved, my work schedule changed, and the novelty wore off. It didn't take long for me to skip church just as often here as I did with the baptist church. It was farther, my work had me awake all night long, and I just didn't feel like I was connecting with the scripted material. My job has changed again, but I still find it hard to get up and go on a Sunday morning. I miss the rousing praise and worship lyrics, and I miss feeling like I am making a personal connection with God on a Sunday.

Despite what I miss, there are very real reasons for not switching back. I found growing up that the baptist church gave me little more advice for getting through hard times than "do your devotions" or "if you're struggling spiritually right now, it's because you're not really living out your faith" or "if God feels distant, it's your fault for not spending enough time with him." "In order to really worship God during the worship service you need to really MEAN the words you are saying." In addition to that, there was always the issue with mega churches being more concerned with making the service "culturally relevant" or giving sermons like "3 ways to read your Bible better" or "7 steps to having a healthy relationship with God." Don't get me wrong, I like self-help books. I do find them mostly helpful, but I don't think the Bible should be treated like one. In an effort to connect with people, I feel like the evangelical church has largely dismissed the fact that the Bible is all we really need. It's decided that since we are losing young people, we need to do something to fix it ourselves.

There's nothing wrong with updating the music, or trying to connect with people, but there is when it is done so at the expense of what the Bible really has to say. We are losing people to science and education because when they grow up and experience the "real world" they have no solid foundation to stand on. When we treat the Bible like a self-help book, it's no wonder people toss it aside like the latest edition of the "Purpose Driven Life" after reading it once or twice.

So you can see where the frustration comes from. I feel like I'm limbo between two, mostly, unappealing choices. Each for its own reasons, but neither one really drawing me there. The worst part of it is that I'm not sure going to one or the other will really fix the problem. I've tried, for several months now, and neither one is really attractive to me. So what I wonder is how to fix the problem? If it was a simple matter of deciding which one I agree with theologically, it wouldn't be such a big deal. I could spend some time and wrestle it out with my Bible. But it's more than that. It's not my head I'm frustrated with, it's my heart and my emotions. And I don't know how to reconcile the two.

Elimination diet take 2

So, remember that elimination diet I was supposed to be on in December to help me test for food allergies? Well, with all of the holiday stuff, it just didn't happen. Now here we are in January and I am a week in to my second attempt. It's not easy. Especially the first few days, I was practically starving. I didn't follow it as strictly as I should have due to the extreme hunger that eating only fish or lamb or turkey and vegetables leaves you with. However, I do feel like I'm starting to kind of figure out how to make this work. And I've begun to notice a difference.

For the first time since I can remember, getting only 6 hours of sleep is not a death sentence. I mean, yes I still sleep for 12 hours if I don't set an alarm, but getting up with the alarm is not as much of a struggle as it usually is. I have more energy in the morning, and am still mostly able to keep going at the end of the day. The gym is more enjoyable, and I have more motivation to get things done than I have in a really long time. If feeling like a normal person is the result I get, then this is totally worth it. The only other time I ever remember feeling not tired on a regular basis was when Dr. Stillings gave me those vitamins. But they made me sick, so it really wasn't worth it to keep taking them. I have three more weeks on the restricted diet, and we'll see what happens after that. Hopefully the results will be in my favor. For now, I'm just glad that I am feeling better. :)

The scariest prayer ever

I have several friends that are not Christians. On occasion, I hear things from them like "Christianity is on its way out" "It's amazing that it hasn't been relegated to the land of myth like the Greek gods were" "It has no support." "The Bible is so full of contradictions, the only way anyone could possibly believe it is if they turn a blind eye to the truth that is staring them in the face." Then I read articles like this one and I can't help but think that there is a reason Christianity's biggest confrontation comes from americans who are well educated.

It's a fairly well known fact in Christian circles that Christianity tends to die during times of peace and tranquility. When our lives are just exactly the way we want them to be, there's no reason to trust in a higher power. We are well fed, and our every desire is, mostly, provided for. Why should I pray to an invisible being to care for me when I seem to be doing just fine on my own? It's not until all hell breaks loose that we begin to look for help beyond what man can provide. That is why it is in persecution that Christianity becomes real for the majority of people who say they believe. Nothing like a gun to your head to make you quite certain of where you stand.

That makes me wonder though. We are called as Christians to not be complacent. We are called to be passionate, on fire witnesses for Christ and His kingdom. If that is the case, far too many of us have done just the opposite. We have allowed ourselves to buy into our culture that tells us we don't really need God. So we sleep in on Sunday mornings. Or we decide that it's not that big of a deal to do our devotions every day. After all, it's not like its that big of a deal if we skip church once, or skip our Bible reading occasionally. It's not like God is going to send fire from the sky. It's our life, so why should it matter? Because we are told to act differently. It is our job to show others the light of Christ, and if we don't, then God will certainly find someone else who will.

In looking at my own life, my parents are a great example of this to me. Neither one of them grew up in strongly Christian homes, although my Dad still went to church every sunday. Mom had a little exposure to Christianity when she was a child, but did not become a Christian until college. Dad became a Christian in High school. Both of them are far more devoted than I feel I am most of the time. And it's the same for every other adult I know who had it rough growing up and became a christian later in life. They all know what it's like for life to be tough, and they know how much easier it is when you have God on your side.

I never had to worry about that stuff. I grew up in a Christian family. My parents were never divorced, and I became a Christian when I was 7, old enough to know I was missing something, but young enough so that I can't really remember the difference, if there was much of one. I have always taken my situation for granted. God has always provided for me. And I have consistently let Him down. It's something I am quite aware of, but not something that generally bothers me enough to do much about it. That is, I go in spurts of 6 months, or so (sometimes less, sometimes more) where I am hungry. I want to read my Bible. I want to go to church. I want to spend time with Him. These usually occur right around the time I am experiencing some kind of major transition in life. For example, when I first moved to Texas, the only way I made it through that summer was because God provided for me; and the only reason I got to stay was because He gave me a job and place to stay.

See the pattern? When life is rough, I lean on God. When it's not, I don't. It's a common occurrence among Americans, and other first world Christians, I think. But the question then, is, why don't we do something about it? If we can't change our feelings while we are being provided for, then why don't we ask God to do whatever it takes to bring us closer to him? I think the answer lies in our very complacency. We can't ask God to take away our blessings, and to make sure that we lean on him, because then our lives would not be so great. And we like being comfortable.

We ask God to make us more passionate, but we are not willing to undergo what is necessary for that to happen. As a result, nothing changes. Perhaps God would not go to the extent of making us lose our jobs, or our housing, but we have no clue to what extent He would go to make our passion real. Because of that, we'll never ask. The potential results are just too scary.

New Year, new beginnings

New Year's resolutions. So many people make them. So few actually keep them. What's the point anyway? We decide that since it's a new year, we want to get a fresh start on all of those things we dislike about ourselves; strengthening weaknesses, getting rid of bad habits, or maybe just trying something you've never tried before. Whatever the reason, by the time February rolls around, almost everyone has fallen off the wagon. I wonder why that is?

I think this happens for a variety of reasons. We make resolutions to try something we don't really want to try, or to fix something about ourselves that we don't really care to fix. We make resolutions so that we can feel better better about ourselves, so that we can feel like we are continuing to move forward with our lives. And they are usually made with good intentions. For example, I was putting some thought into mine, and since I know that I don't walk the dog as much as I should, or go to church every week, or even do my devotions very often, that maybe those three things should be my resolutions. Walk the dog every day. (And be more consistent with his training too, because Lord knows he needs that) Go to church every week. Read my Bible every day. None of these are bad things. In fact, I would venture a guess that the reason I want them to be resolutions is because I do not do them,but (for obvious reasons) feel that as a responsible adult, I should do them.

But then I stopped to think about it. Why don't I do them? Is it because I don't want to? No. I enjoy all three of those things when I actually do them. Taking Loki to the dog park to watch him run is often the highlight of my week, and I enjoy church and reading my Bible as well. The problem is not that I hate them and just need to practice doing them so I enjoy it more and therefore do them more often. And I don't think turning them into my list of "resolutions" is going to change the fact that they don't happen as often as I feel they should. Were I to do that, come February, I'd be back where I started just like everyone else.

I think the problem comes from a lack of priorities. I work full time, and have papers to grade and lessons to plan. I'm tired when I get home from work, so it's easy to feed the dog, let him go to the bathroom, and veg out for the rest of the night. I get up early for work as it is, so it's easy to let myself sleep until the last possible minute. My weekends are my only times off, so it's easy to sleep that extra hour instead of going to church. Essentially, I have taken my job, and placed it as the highest priority in my life currently. After all, my bank account doesn't suffer if I sleep through church. The dog doesn't fire me for only letting him run once a week.

I think the problem is that I don't feel it to be 100% necessary to do these other things because work has to come first, and then my sanity. And if I feel like the best way to keep my sanity is to not do these other things that I should be doing, I won't do them. That's why turning them into New's Year's Resolutions won't do any good. That's why so many people drop their resolutions a month after starting them. They aren't a high enough priority. And they won't be until I and everyone else changes the way we look at things.

So this year, instead of listing the little things I don't do and wish I did, I'm going to try something different, I'm going to look at the big picture. This year, I resolve to make myself into the best person I feel I can be, and feel God wants me to be. This year, I'm focusing on the inside, instead of the outside, and let the results be what they may. Here's to 2014.