Watermelon is a vine-like flowering plant originally from southern Africa. Its fruit, which is also called watermelon, is a special kind referred to by botanists as a pepo, a berry which has a thick rind and fleshy center. ~Wikipedia
So cold, so frosty from the fridge, the sweetness – it’s like I am eating juicy, red chunks of a sugary snow-cone.
Little secret? The reason you are not finding the delicious, sweet and satisfying watermelons of your youth is your obsession with seed-free varieties. You are selecting unnatural fruit, or “berries,” as it were. Don’t be afraid of a seed. It is proof there is something of heaven and the eternal there. Everything around the seeds echo the transcendence…
The greatest thing since sliced bread? Especially on a rare overcast Colorado morning???
Oroweat Premium Sliced Italian Bread. It is white, it is wheat and I am sure plenty glutenous. But it makes THE most incredible toast. It gets crispy, all of it, just lightly on the outside. But somehow is still steamy and soft in between the crispiness.
With just real butter. Or with the butter plus some jam.
Hot coffee. Italian bread toasted to perfection, topped with deliciousness. YUM!
DP introduced me to this and still, 2 weeks later, I watch it and I still laugh.
Things You CAN’T Do When You’re NOT a Dog
And then there is this: Shoot Christians Say, which is so my hilarious-native-tongue
But where was: I have a check in a my spirit? Because we Jesus-Kingdom types are very sensitive to those checks. Tripp & Tyler // Their channel on YouTube Because – I just NEEDED to laugh today.
I am realizing how much our “tribe” {us “Christian people”} throw little quotes and sayings around about God, giving them all the veracity of actual scripture, when in fact, they merely began as someone’s interpretation and probably had a catchy rhythm for some sermon or another. And sometimes, they may have been re-stated as a scriptural explanation flat-out wrong.
There is one that has been bugging me. A lot. And I am not saying it wasn’t a point in purity and truth at some point. I am just saying I have heard it in various ways over many years, usually it’s used to shrug-off and dismiss a fellow believer who is going through a very hard time:
“Well, God isn’t interested in your comfort, He is interested in your character.”
Or – “God isn’t concerned with your comfort, He wants to build your character.”
Isn’t that alliteration just peachy-preachy? So catchy. So, Obviously-those-people-weren’t-maturing-fast-enough-like-myself-so-God-wants-them-to-suffer-so-no-one-should-show-compassion-because-God-wants-it-this-way-and-couldn’t-care-less-about-their-pain-until-they-get-as-right-as-me.
Grrrr. But seriously – I have seen it, had it thrown at me, and sadly, probably thought it or said it, too, about others in crisis. Maybe it made me feel a little more spiritually superior when I couldn’t explain why something bad was happening to a perfectly normal human.
It has also been said these ways:
“God doesn’t care about your character, he cares about your heart.”
Which also doesn’t really work, either, does it? Oh yes, He looks at the heart, but the condition of your heart is at the center of your character and maturity. Pure heart = pure character, I’d say.
“God isn’t interested in our comfort, He is interested in our healing.”
Which – well, isn’t being healed the ultimate in comfort? Doesn’t that actually prove He IS, in fact, interested in our comfort?
I am not talking about comfort in the sense that I get everything I want at the exact moment I want it. It isn’t about plumping my pillow to exactly the way I like so I can feel comfortable. It is about needing comfort for gut-wrenching pain sometimes, for things that have gone very wrong relationally or circumstantially despite our best efforts.
We can’t dismiss the fact that we are living in a fallen world and horrible things happen to amazingly good, redeemed people. It rains on the just and the unjust. Your heart can be broken to bits whether you have trusted in Jesus as your Savior or not. And while I wholly believe and am filled with hope at the thought that God doesn’t waste our pain, I think we are often too mean-spirited and so unlike the Father when we the hard things people face without the compassion we have been shown. We are judgemental and sanctimonious when we can stand back, arms folded, and decree: Well, obviously, God doesn’t care whether you’re hurting or not. He wants to see you have some character, doggone it, so get over it and be miserable.
Good news:
Even the Apostle Paul went through perilous, awful, times of despair and trouble – while he was doing God’s will! So at least we are in good company. 2 Corinthians chapter one begins with him recounting the turbulence in his path:
We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters,about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us (verses 8-10)
It gets better:
But guess what else? Verses 3-7 introduce us to a God we rarely hear preached about except at funerals. But He is not just comforting people who lose some one through death – he is the God of all comfort for the things we face in life!
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.
Did you see that? Being comforted, receiving comfort actually produces patient endurance in suffering. We become able to bear so much more when we are comforted. It doesn’t make us sissies, it makes us stronger, warriors to end.
God won’t waste your pain.That quote I can get into, because the Word says here that we get to share the comfort we received from God with others. But to say God isn’t interested in our comfort? Just that I be recklessly used and abused and hurt and troubled and if I jump every hoop correctly maybe I will finally prove I am good enough? Pppphst!
Oh, He is who the Word says He is. He is the Father (the beginning) of compassion. He is the God of all comfort. And I have news for you: He comforts us in ALL our troubles so we have something to give to others who are troubled. He comforts us as we suffer like Christ so we can also share in the abounding comfort of Christ. If we are suffering, troubled, distressed, we are comforted from God our Father and it flows through us and over us and around us as we comfort those nearby.
The picture I got of this was my childhood roller-skating experiences. I spent two years of my life (3 – 5) on metal roller skates and I fell a lot and have the scars on these knees to prove it. I can remember running in, bloodied knees, again and again and my mom did not once say, “Well, that is what you get and you’re going to keep getting until you determine to skate better.” My mom would always pull out the mercuricome antiseptic and band aids and a sudsy washcloth and soothe me with understanding. She comforted me when I fell. I think we are all smart enough to understand what comfort is. It is care. It is concern. It is served with compassion. It doesn’t necessarily fix anything, but oh it soothes the brokenness and helps us endure to the end…
So, there.
God IS interested in your comfort because He wants you to have what it takes to endure to the end – no matter what life and circumstances bring.
“And yet what more could He have said about it than He has said: ‘As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted.’ Notice the as and so in this passage: ‘As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.’ It is real comforting that is meant here; the sort of comforting that a child feels when it is ‘dandled on its mother’s knees, and borne on her sides’…” ~Hannah Whitehall Smith (1832-1911), The God of All Comfort
“The LORD comforts His people and will have compassion on His afflicted ones.” Isaiah 49.13 NIV
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5.4
Ay-yi-yi how I have longed for thee, my little WordPress spell-checker!
Good gravy, people, I HATE HATE HATE proof-reading. A couple of months ago my blog quit spell-checking. I would hit the button and it would tell me, though I could see with my very own eyes that I indeed had misspellings, “No misspellings found.” LIAR!
I updated everything I knew to update. I researched online and the only answer I could find was: No one knows why it happening to certain blogs. UGH!
I am actually a pretty good speller (which according to spell-check is not a word). But I am a horrid typist when I am under the magical-spell of writing-inspiration. My fingers fly way too close to the sun. My thinking is: let me get this out before I explode and then spell-check can correct me. But spell-check had bailed. Spell-check just left me hanging, just abandoned me!
Dave and others had suggested I just type it all in MS Word first and check it there and then paste it into the blog. People, I implore you – please don’t give me yet another step!!!
Actually, I believe in proof-reading and spell-checking and the importance of good grammar and punctuation and all that. But I have also been rebelling against “leadership excellence means never making a mistake, not-ever in your entire life to prove you are of value to society” a little, too.
This taught me a lesson. I am going to be good now and try to, maybe, possibly, as often as I can, whenever it seems necessary, to the best of my ability, if I can possibly stand it: spell-check AND proofread before I publish, generally speaking. Maybe.
Averi and I ran some errands yesterday. We purchased a package of brightly-colored, stretchy headbands for which she had an instant affinity and she was explaining to me how much she loved the bright colors, but she was trying to think of the “right” word for them.
“Neon!” She finally remembered. They were neon-colored! Oh, how she loves neon colors, she kept effusing while deciding which one or two to wear with her outfit.
“Did you know, ” I took her down memory lane, “that when your daddy and all your aunts were little kids back in the 80s, neon was a huge thing? They had lots of neon clothes and shoes and headbands back then!”
She was awed by this news.
“Really, Nonna? Wow! God must have thought all the little children wouldn’t know about neon unless He made it for them now. So He made some more neon so we would know!”
Her extreme gratefulness for God’s kindness in making neon known to her all these years later was evident as she adjusted her headband and sighed, with a very big smile on her cute little face, “I love neon colors.”
In other news….
A wonderful thing: I got $60 worth of kid’s Creatology Musical Instruments today at Michael’s for a little less than $12! Yay! I had been wanting them for the grandbebe playroom.
I can just hear a little {grandbebe} band making merry music in my very near future! In good, old-fashioned primary colors. ;)
I have shared this wonderful tomato story before. This is love. :)
An old Italian man lived alone in upstate New York. He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work, as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:
Dear Vinnie,
I’m pretty upset. It looks like I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. The ground is just too hard. I know if you were here you would dig it for me. Oh well. Maybe in the future.
Love, Papa
A few days later he received a letter from his son.
Dear Pop,
Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where the bodies are buried.
Love, Vinnie
At 4 am the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.
Dear Pop,
You should be able to plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
Love, Vinnie
I LOVE Italian food!
Scooped from the bottom, the thickest of it. *Mmmmmmm…..
I madeWalnut-Basil Pesto from Lidia’s Italy {{click here}} with fresh, bright green basil from my garden and it is sooooooooooooo good, I could practically eat it with a spoon all by itself.
But instead, I put it on some chicken tenders last night with provolone and it is still making me salivate to think about it. I also tried spreading some on corn on the cob, and guess what? YES! It was so good!
Thanks to Lidia, I now know I can freeze it for later, but then again – I am not sure I will be able to because it is so scrumptious. It is the taste of pure garlic-infused, sun-powered, tangy chlorophyll. I threw away the store-bought jar of gray-green pesto from the fridge. Because it should look as amazing as it tastes and greener than green because it is that fresh.
Just this one and Google (for searching anything you can dream up). The image above is from Amazon, of course.
Mel. :)
Mel Bartholomew is the father of smart gardening. And how you can grow more veggies in less space with way less work and we all need to know these things!
I hated vegetable gardening as a kid. Can you believe that?
But one day, I decided that I had had enough of grocery store tomatoes. I couldn’t quit thinking of summers at my Aunt Rosie’s. Her redwood-stained picnic table was loaded daily with her freshest picks from the garden. We ate corn on the cob, green beans cooked with bacon and juicy hamburgers. But the piece de resistance was the tomato. The tomato in her garden was the queen. She cut huge slabs of beefsteak tomatoes, red through and through and passed the platter, then the salt. And the tingling, tart-sweet explosion on your tongue – well, you had to be there.
So when my kids were all teenagers, I became a gardener. I decided to grow tomatoes and green beans and baby zucchini, plucked and grilled while tiny and delectable instead of waiting for them to become brick bats and then running out of friends and relatives to pawn them on. I decided to be a gardener.
And glory be, I found THIS book at the library.
This was Mel’s original Square Foot Gardening book
I shudder to think what my experience may have been had it not been for Mel Bartholomew. Because even though I had actually checked about 16 gardening books out at once,his message sounded truer than any of the others, logical, just made sense. It was simple and doable and I took 37.42 pages of notes on his book.
An I had THE MOST amazing garden. I had a huge yard back then and threw garden boxes in all over the place. I even had room for more than 20 tomato plants. I had harvest coming out my ears of everything I grew: okra, swiss chard, lettuces, peppers of every color, 4 or 5 types of radish, corn, mini-corn, watermelon, cucumbers, strawberries and grapes – everything you could imagine – but mostly, tomatoes.
My Aunt Rosie, right
My Aunt Rosie and I talked on the phone a lot that year and exchanged letters excitedly sharing that day’s harvest, “Well, today I got about 16 beefsteak tomatoes, a bowl full of cherry and half a basket of plum. The parsley and basil are running wild. I have a large pot of green beans on the stove for dinner.” We loved sharing the great good news of the garden.
Square-Foot Gardening – Grow More in Less Space
I checked Mel’s book out regularly for the first few years, each January. Imagine my delight when I walked in to the library annual book sale a few years down the road and there it was for 10-cents. How truly fortuitous. I have THE orginal book from which I was first inspired to garden and LOVE it!
And now Mel has made it even easier. I got his newer book just last summer. The charts, wisdom, the inspiration, the cheering on – all of it. THE only book you’ll ever really need. But I am keeping both of mine! :)
Wasn’t it just yesterday we were up in the mountains, a staff retreat for a church I worked at, and didn’t we just get the call, “Stephanie is on her way to the hospital to have the baby,” and wasn’t it, of course in {the middle of the night}??! And didn’t we JUST throw our things together and hit the road, passing over the Continental Divide and zooming down the mountain to be there for her birth? And wasn’t it the most beautiful early morning thing ever? No, it wasn’t yesterday, it was 8 very fun-filled, fast-flying years ago.
As grandbebes go, Guin-Guin was number three, only her big brother, Gavin and her cousin, Hunter-Magoo ahead of her. Right away, she established that she wasn’t anything like the boys. She was, indeed, a girl, an adorable little love-muffin. Quiet, gentle-spirited, thoughtful and determined, Guini’s feet are firmly planted, no push-over, she, but a focused, peaceful and calm disposition emmanates like sun-rays from Guinivere Eden!
“A girl without freckles is like a night without stars.”
Oh, how I love her!
She is my Guini-muggins, my sweet-pea, my Guin-Guin, my darling girl, my first sugar-and-spice grandbebe, my sweet-sweet girly-q! And ~ my flower girl, for ever and always…{below, a video Guini and I made when she turned 5}:
Now…
May the God of all hope and comfort, the God who excitedly fashioned you from the His brightest, loveliest and most creative thoughts and made you so gentle and sensitive in spirit {such a depository of His love and grace}, may that God make His very own will for you known and may it be done and settled here on earth just as He decreed it from heaven. And may you be an agent of His love and grace from your middle-child vantage point and I pray He will deliver you from all evil and that the {fire of your faith} in Jesus Christ {{our Savior!}} will set nations ablaze for His glory, yes! To the praise of His glory!
So be it!
I love you, Guinivere, my darling girl.
Freckles are kisses from the angels. They love to kiss-kiss Guini’s face. Me, too!
It is so hot where I live. I just got home from an intermittently rainy, cool mountain town. The sun is killin’ me, Smalls.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it is this head-cold I woke up with today. But I am trying to “catch up” on posts and tweets and mail and email and life and Sandy-the-Dog time and I am dazed and and perhaps ~ a bit confused.
But I was wondering…?
Why does my house smell like some one else lives here after it has been shut up for a few days? I swear it’s like some one was here in my absence. It just didn’t smell like my house. Not horribly bad necessarily, just not mine.
I signed up to follow Twitter accounts for the newspapers of every town I have ever lived in and then couldn’t take how many posts they generated, so that little idea only lasted about 16 hours. I just do not need to know every single lightening sighting in Cedar Rapids, IA or traffic jam in Gary, IN every 3.2. seconds. Some were so oppressive I remembered why I don’t live there anymore.
But I cannot seem to un-follow the Des Moines Register. Because they twist my brain and I find them most fascinating. I was born there. Just when I went to unfollow them the other day, this:
First – there are no mountains in Iowa. Then, I mean – who would shoot a stuffed mountain lion? And where does a homeless mountain lion hang out? Obviously in Des Moines, I guess. It is now at home at the police station – where there are many, many people with guns. Be careful, stuffed mountain lion, not to get shot again. :)
There was this newsworthy tweet:
I am not sure what the breaking point is? Can you go 49 feet and be safely within the parameters of the law? What is the cut-off for how far you can drive into a corn field before an arrest is made??? Because it seems like we all need to know this! The article failed to mention whether or not the stuffed mountain lion had gone along for the ride for the arrest.
Then, of course, there are the arts in Des Moines. I bet you had no idea you could do this with hay bales, did you?
Or this with actual pigs?
I’m just being silly. I love Iowa. I was born in Des Moines, lived in Davenport, Cedar Rapids and eventually Sioux City (where Stormie was born). The fields there are gorgeously planted and groomed to perfection. I used to buy corn on the cob, as fresh and sweet as is humanly possible, 18 ears for $1. I am an Iowa girl.
But it is true, Denver does not have the same headlines you find there. So I shall keep up with the Des Moines Register for now.
I need some cold medicine.
P.S. Sandy-the-Dog loved Jon and she lived to tell the story. Good job, Jon-Jon!
