In the wilderness...

Even though I still have a long list of ingredients that I am desirous of obtaining, I outgrew the space where I keep my spices and herbs:

[Please ignore the fact that I did not notice the setting on the phone camera had changed.]

I have things falling out of this cabinet, things in with the other baking and cooking ingredients in the regular cupboard, and things in a drawer in the dining room built-ins.  [I still have things in the latter place.]

So, I decided if I am going be the One Who Cooks, then I simply cannot have my corning ware so conveniently located.

This is the rearranged original spice cabinet.

And this is now my Spice Cabinet 2.0.

Since it is above the counter space where I do a lot of prep work, I moved the salts, peppers, Middle Eastern, and Mexican spices over here.  As you can see, I have a wee bit of room for growth.  So, all I need to do is successfully retrain myself as to which spices and herbs are where.  I predict that to be a steep learning curve.  SIGH.

I did find logical places for my corning ware that, although now separated, already make sense to me.  Translate that: I will not "lose" them in my kitchen.

It amazes me that I have six kinds of salt and seven kinds of pepper.  I would like to get better at using them, at finding which fits best with which ingredients.  I also would like a few more peppers.  And I would like to learn to use dried peppers, the way that I have seen on some of my cooking shows.

Just as I have a cheese drawer in my refrigerator (a very, very, very stuffed cheese drawer), I now have a curry paste drawer.  Really, it could be called a paste drawer, because I have the four curry pastes, the tamarind paste, and the tahini in there.

It also amazes me just how many ingredients are needed to cook.  I used my very first wheat flour last night and have not even touched cake flour, self-rising flour, and all the other flours that I do not yet know about or own.  I do not have all that many oils and vinegars and yet I have more than I ever have had in my life.  I have eight sugars, with palm sugar being my latest sugar acquisition.  Those are all real sugars and not sugar substitutes.  Because, you know, I am not into fake sugars or dairies.  I prefer the real, wicked ingredients.

I had a bit of company tonight and we talked food, cooking techniques, cooking shows, impossible topics, and his thesis work, amongst other topics.  During our long conversation, I discovered another way to warm the cockles of my heart:  "What cooking shows do you watch?"  What an incredible kind thing to ask of me.  I also got to hear about his beloved, my dear friend Mary, his cherubs, and his parish.  I plied him with food and bent his ear all evening.

I whipped up some sautéed purple asparagus to go with the hummus muffin as an appetizer for him. The appetizer, though, was not so much for him as it was for me ... for me to have another confirmation that the hummus muffins, though weird sounding, are actually tasty, because I do not believe that I am a good judge of anything these days. I like to read psalms for people before they go, especially someone who probably doesn't have the Bible read much to him since he is usually reading the Bible to others. I picked two and he chose one: 77, 27, and 4. I thought I was reading for him, but as I was reading it occurred to me that I was serving the appetizer all over, that I was actually reading for me. SIGH.

I do.
Despite the confusion I do.
I do so long to simply hear the Word of God.

The fun part was that when my company arrived, he used the doorbell that had been installed just a few hours earlier!  Of course, he pointed out that he know that I knew someone was at the door because of the vocalizations of my little Fluffernutter.  True.  But were I upstairs neither of us would have known he was at the door.  I am hoping a doorbell will wake me up, too.  I look upon it as a bit of a safety feature.  Maybe I am just reaching though??

This is the simple light fixture that Electrician Man used to replace the bare bulb on the back porch.  [Feel free to admire the lovely painting job that Firewood Man did for me.]

The other task Electrician Man accomplished today was so totally a want, though I am searching for ways to call it a need:  He installed a GFIC outlet on the airing porch.  Wouldn't it be fun to string some white twinkle lights up there some time?  I can now hang out there for eons with my electronics.  And, come to think of it, I can bring my small space heater up there in the dead of winter so enjoy some fresh air.  Isn't year long fresh air a need?

I will say that, having paid for painting I could have done myself, if push came to shove, and paying for the electrical work, I ended up spending every single penny (or almost) that I have saved this year being penurious with my utilities. So, rather than coming out ahead in budgeting, I won't break the bank with the electrical work.  I wanted to come out ahead.  I wanted to be the lean, mean, financial machine.  I am not, though. I am very, very, very good at times, but I still do a bit of therapeutic shopping, such as buying contraband from the specialty grocery store, and, I will admit, salivating over a stand mixer.  For that matter, I did not need a jean jacket, even though I am making good use of it and it is not a hoodie.  And, frankly, Amos did not actually need the Beaver Baby that I bought him a couple of months ago.  I am a financial hypocrite.  SIGH.

I did write the checks for Firewood Man and Electrician Man with a checkbook I have had for 30 years.  [Leather is a good investment.]  It is strange how I have so many new things in my life—more than a poor person should probably have—and yet have so very many things, including clothes, that are 20-30 years old.   And older ... if you consider how much of my grandmother's household things I still utilize.

Anyway, as my company left to get back to his studies, he asked if he could give me a hug.  I am in dire need of one, but I couldn't accept it.  I'd probably scream and dive behind the couch because I need distance.  I wanted so badly to say, "Yes!" because, I think, really he would only have been passing on a hug from Mary.  Instead, I tried to ask him, being a pastor and all, for what I want so desperately to hear:  that I am forgiven.  Not absolution, mind you, but to hear that the possibility for forgiveness still exists despite what I think and feel and worry about faith and belief.  I could barely keep from weeping trying to fumble through finding a way to ask such a thing and broke down and started wailing after he left, the gut-wrenching, soul-tearing sobbing that I did after my father died.

Silly, silly, silly Myrtle.

The wailing is finished, but the weeping remains.
The tremors still wrack my body.
And my soul feels frighteningly fragile.

Silly, silly, silly Myrtle.

I have been trying to write the longer story about what I started reading, but I keep failing.  The short version is that I stumbled upon a podcast interview of Micheal Card in which I learned: 1) he has authored 27 books (he said he writes books that only 10 folk usually want to read) and 2) the most favorite book of his own pen is A Sacred Sorrow.

I bought it.
I am reading it.
I long to have someone with whom to share my thought about it.

Personally, I believe the book to be a good use of Amazon promotional credits.  It is on his theme of Lament as Worship.  Lament does not lead one to worship, but it is worship.  For when we lament, we recognize our state and acknowledge our need for God, oft speaking of what He has done, is doing, and will do for us.

There is much that I wish to write about the book already, though I am not finished.  Only sometimes I wonder if it is even possible to capture the glimpses of ... God ... that have flickered across its pages.

So many of us simply remain, willingly and willfully abandoned in this wilderness.  We do not know where we are.  We do not know where we are going.  We even lack the language to describe our desolate place in this frustratingly verdant place.  Bound by the personal sorrows and hurts we leave outside the door on a thousand Sundays, we are left to languish while those around us drink from a fountain that, to our eyes, looks dry.  We are slaves to what we do not know.  And muted by what we find ourselves unable to speak.  We are thirsty.  We are word-less and way-less. Our best hope of finding our way back to true worship lies along the pathway of lament, a path that promises to provide the only route through the green dessert. If indeed we are lost, we must push forward together and take the land, refusing any longer to live as strangers there.

...Our failure to lament also cuts us off from each other. If you and I are to know one another in a deep way, we must not only share our hurts, anger, and disappointments with each other (which we often do), we must also lament them together before the God who hears and is moved by our tears.  Only then does our sharing become truly redemptive in character.  The degree to which I am willing to enter into the suffering of another person reveals the level of my commitment and love for them. If I am not interested in your hurts, I am not really interested in you. Neither am I willing to suffer to know you nor to be known by you. Jesus' perfect example makes these truths come alive in our hearts. He is the One who suffered to know us, who then suffered for us on the cross. In all this, He revealed the hesed of His father."


My dear friend Bettina went to a Bible study on the Psalms a while ago.  One study was on Psalm 6, a lament:

O LORD, do not rebuke me in Thine anger,
Nor chasten me in Thy wrath.
Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am pining away;
Heal me, O LORD, for my bones are dismayed.
And my soul is greatly dismayed;
But Thou, O LORD--how long?

Return, O LORD, rescue my soul;
Save me because of Thy lovingkindness.
For there is no mention of Thee in death;
In Sheol who will give Thee thanks?

I am weary with my sighing;
Every night I make my bed swim,
I dissolve my couch with my tears.
My eye has wasted away with grief;
It has become old because of all my adversaries.

Depart from me, all you who do iniquity,
For the LORD has heard the voice of my weeping.
The LORD has heard my supplication,
The LORD receives my prayer.
All my enemies will be ashamed and greatly dismayed;
They shall turn back, they will suddenly be ashamed.

~Psalm 6 (NASB 1977)


I had forgotten, until she reminded me, that afterwards, Becky penned her own lament:

LORD, where are you?
  I do not hear you.
You are everywhere,
  Yet my soul knows silence.
Countless are my advarsaries,
  Their numbers are untold.
Great and mighty is the Lord, my God.
  He has caused the earth's bounty.

I feel abandoned,
  Left alone to myself.
All I accomplish is laid to waste,
  My work is a pile of rubbish.
I am made to wait.
  How long, Lord, how long?
I am weary and tired.
  I know no rest.
On and on I trod,
  And find myself in circles.
Is this all you have for me?
  Is there no more?

I know you have a plan,
  There is still good here.
Hear my cry, Lord God,
  Give me the desires of my heart.
For you always I long for,
  You are my hiding place.
You bring me to you,
  You are my rest.

Would that it were I had the skill to pen my own.  

Such beauty here.  

Such faith.

The book explores lament as worship, first by introducing the concept, then looking at lament in the lives of Job, David, Jeremiah, and Jesus.  Michael Card concludes with the lost language of lament.  As much as I long to get to that last chapter, I have been lingering in Part Two, which is about Job.  Such an interesting perspective.

At times, I see in his writings the theology that differs from the Christian Book of Concord, but woven throughout them is also that which is solidity Gospel.  A prime example being the emphatic stance that worship is not what we do for God, but what God does for us.

I am enjoying seeing a further exploration of hesed and long to dive back into the waters of Micheal Card's commentaries on the gospels.  I am too much of a literary oaf to properly explain, but the lament of our souls, Michael Card writes, has its bases in Genesis and what took place in the garden.  Lament, at its heart, is two-fold: a longing for the presence of God (because we were created to be with Him) and a perceived lack of hesed (because that is essence of our triune God).  The Deceiver, then, broke the fellowship Adam and Eve had with their creator.  To this day, the Deceiver works to do the same.  We stand and look around at our lives, at our world, and we protest what we see and experience to God as being the opposite of the promise of hesed.  Failing, Michael Card tells us, to understand that suffering is the fullness of hesed, for the greatest hesed our Father has to offer us is the cross.

I wrote a while ago that Michael Card believes in the perfection of Jesus. In the perfection of every word that He spoke and the perfection of every time He remained silent.  He believes in the perfection of every word of the Bible and that there is no mistake in the words God chose to have penned for His creation.  Ponder, then, this:  What does God say to Pharaoh?  Not merely "let My people go."  God doesn't stop there.  He finishes, "let my people go so that they may worship me in the wilderness."

...in the wilderness

Often, it seems, the wilderness is relegated to the Israelites 40-year journey and Jesus' 40-day sojourn.  But the wilderness began with the first bite of fruit and continues to this day.  David lived in the wilderness.  All who follow Christ do, too.  But it is there, in the wilderness, where we are joined with God and experience His hesed.

This might make no sense, but in a way it seems that to be lost in the wilderness is actually to be found.

I think of that first bite.  It is simple and clear.  But Micheal Card points out that the fall of mankind is more than a bite of fruit:

...But it was not simply the bite itself that caused the Fall and gave birth to the first groaning of lament from both creature and creation.  The bite was only a consequent act of disbelief.  It was the denial and doubting of God's hesed that led to the dis-belief that caused the two prodigals to be driven into the wilderness of His absence, never to return.  It was bound up in the mis-belief that God was only the sum of His gifts and no more.  All this flowing from the stubborn sin of un-belief.

As the two outcasts made their stumbling way out the garden, the hesed of God caused an innocent animal to be sacrificed to make garments to cover the nakedness of the first couple, so they would know they were naked.  By such sacrifices, their sins would be covered until the time when they ould be washed away by a final torrential wave of hesed that would break down the hillside of Golgotha, as One who was Himself the Presence of God would cry out in lament.

The Presence of that had always been (and sadly would have always been) palpable and immediate was altered, seemingly broken, and lament became the language of Adam and Eve, of you and me, and indeed of all creation (see Romans 8:22).

Hesed disbelieved.

     Presence seemingly broken.

The lamentable journey began through Adam for all mankind.  But the heartbreaking sorry of the three (Adam, Eve, and God) was not and could never be beyond His perfect intention.  It was a sovereign sorrow that fell upon the world, a wordless sorrow beyond our knowing.  And as His loving wisdom does with all things, even and especially with our sin, God would redeem their disobedience and sorrow, transforming it by means of His hesed into a pathway back to the loving-kindness of His Presence.

It was a shadowy path that began outside the garden.  It meanders through all our lives, inevitably leading us through the darkest valleys of our fallen experience.  But we must never forget that it is a path, that it is going somewhere.  There is a final destination somewhere outside the gates of a city....


Our journeys of lament are going somewhere....