Radical Monotony

This year, I turn 24. Achingly close to the culturally-acclaimed pinnacle of my life and looks.

What am I doing with my one wild and adventurous life?

I am learning to be married, praying for healthy children soon, and working 40 hours a week loving on the toddlers of other 20-somethings who make more money than I do.

I am not ashamed of my job; on most days, I enjoy it--but when I compare my journey with the journeys of others I know, my heart grows dark. My best friend Lindsay (who always will be cooler than me) works in South Korea, living her dream, romping with crazy awesome new friends and soaking in a foreign culture. Another bestie, Elizabeth, spent all of 2011 on the World Race, loving on hundreds of kids, romping with crazy awesome people, eating bugs, speaking truth to the hopeless, and soaking in a dozen foreign cultures. My husband is spending his hours studying to become a doctor, so he can love on people and save their lives for the rest of his life.

I blog, but only for my own enjoyment: I know I'm not a fantastic story teller, or any sort of photographer at all. What this means is that, to the world, and to hip cultural Christianity, I am boring. My mundane life wouldn't bother me if the internet weren't full of Christians just as caught up in wanderlust as our culture: this desire to go, be, to live an orgy of experiences and adventures and then settle down to a plaid-wearing spouse and write best-selling books about how you met God in Cambodia.

But, reader, I can't believe that Jesus calls me away from the life I am now living. I have never felt a call to overseas missions; my personality and talents are much better suited for one-on-one relationships in a small community. I don't want, or feel the tug on my soul, to learn another language and move to a jungle. And, reader, I don't believe this negates God's call and purpose for my life.

Andrew Byers, in his excellent article "We Need Boring Christians," (go read it) reminds us that "Radical discipleship is not adventure tourism." Jesus, by changing my heart and calling me to himself in forgiveness, has already called me to a radical life. But my radical life right now doesn't look radical. But, reader, I am free in Christ to live a mundane life where He has placed me and my family. I am free to work, to help my husband pay the bills as he studies all day to pass his medical boards. I am free to be a servant to people I don't know, and to their children -- many of them Muslims. I am free to follow and strive to be like Jesus in the small way He has called me to in this season. I am free to trust and struggle on the dark days.

I hope this monotony of daily living and trusting is never shameful to me.

Homemade Christmas

Our very first Christmas together as a married couple is fast approaching -- well, is already here. We don't have much room in our apartment for a tree, and we don't have much money to spend on buying lots of decorations that we'll just have to store and move over the next few years anyway.

But how to make our little home feel like Christmas?

We spent most of our weekend doing just that. Armed with paper, scissors, and some imagination, we made Christmas.

(Be kind and remember I don't claim to be a professional photographer.)

We hung snowflakes cut from notebook paper and Anthropologie catalogues from our kitchen pass-through.

They make magic shadows.

Cake stand, old book, sugar = winter.

(the light was terrible)

Some greenery, more paper trees, and a mason jar.

Same theme, different notes.

It's simple, and definitely not Martha Stewart, but we're happy.

On Contentment

The dryer is purring, the brownies in the oven filling our apartment with chocolatey smells, and this nasty month-long cold seems to be on its way out at last.

I don't often feel content, especially in the throes of daily living -- even when that daily living is filled with things I have longed for: my beloved husband, a full-time job I enjoy, good food and my own home... All of those joys come with many more sacrifices, much hard work and responsibility, much dying to self. To really embrace my marriage and keep it healthy, Millie has to die. To love and serve my toddlers at work, Millie has to die. To keep my home clean and hospitable, Millie has to die. What strange ways God works and gives and grows us, that in order to live, we must die.

This paradox has been playing in my mind for months, especially in the light that these five months of new marriage have been the hardest of my life -- and I do not say that lightly. God has put pain in our lives these past months that Andrew and I could never have foreseen, never have prepared ourselves for. We pray that we are being sanctified through these deaths, in the strange way that God works His wonders.

One of the struggles since marriage has been fighting to find a job, to find my place in this community, to find how I can work and contribute -- to a business and to my family. I approached the job market with the gifts that God brought out in me during college, gifts that would be valuable in the work field: organizational and administrative skills from working in my college library, writing and editing abilities from four years of English study, customer service from summers waitressing, and patience and flexibility from working at Ridge Haven. I held these out, seeing my gifts and abilities, and God ignored all of them. I was so sure He would place me somewhere to continue refining these gifts He's showed me, in some office, or even a library.

Absolutely not.

I'm an assistant teacher at a daycare -- a job I genuinely enjoy, but never would have placed myself in. (I had never even changed a diaper until the day of my working interview.)

My struggle has not been with the job itself, though some days that has been the source of my frustration. I just wonder what the balance is between developing and using the gifts and talents that He gives, and relying on Him. So often I feel way over my head, uncertain, inadequate, like I don't have what I need to do my job well. But I have Him, and that's enough. So then, what with my abilities? I know they don't sanctify me, or earn me favor; I just wonder how they're going to come into play later, or if they were only for that past season.

Like in every season, all I can do is trust, and I can trust, because I know that this God, my Maker and Savior, not only knows me, but loves me.

And every day for the rest of my life, I have to cry, I believe; help my unbelief. And I'm so thankful that I am free to be patient. His timing in my heart is specially suited for my life.

The Avett Brothers

This is one reason I love these guys so much: they pulled this gem out at the Tuesday concert.



I lost my voice Tuesday evening, and still don't have it back.

[insert title here]

There is no continuity here, so consider yourself warned. I do not apologize.

Look, something shiny!

Etsy

1.This cold I've had for two weeks? I don't think it's going anywhere: While talking to one of my little toddlers at work the other day, he sneezed. While my mouth was open. He sneezed in my mouth.  

2. I finally got a Pinterest account!

3. Two of Andrew's buddies have birthdays this week, so they're coming over for dinner on Wednesday. We bought a duck (we wanted a goose, but that sucker was $70!), and I'm working on my pie crust for a chocolate bourbon pecan pie. Mmmm!

4. Tomorrow night? Drew will be here. Oh, and the Avett Brothers. Yup. We'll be there.

Image via The Avett Brothers

Mallow Mania!

Did you know that a marsh mallow is actually a plant? The Althaea officinalis is, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, indigenous to Africa, and thanks to an ancient remedy for sore throats made from its roots, we now have delicious floats in our steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

Image via Wikipedia

Thank you, pretty flower!

I have wanted to make my own mallows for a good while , after learning that, in fact, this is possible, and that my grandmother made her own marshmallows all the years she and my grandfather lived in Brazil, when my mother was very small. Andrew's weekend absence on a church men's retreat provided the perfect canvas for my amateur culinary art splatters.

(Before I proceed, I must warn you that I planned to take pictures of the process, but as it is a rather time-sensitive ordeal, and Andrew wasn't around to help ... there are none. I shall borrow some from The Mighty Internets.)

My favorite cookbook, Baked, from the rather well-known Brooklyn bakery of the same name (check them and their sweet cookbook out here), contains dozens of yummies I'm dying to try, but today, it was mallows. 

They seem fairly straight-forward, as home-made candies go, only requiring six ingredients: gelatin, sugar, corn syrup, vanilla, salt, and confectioner's sugar. Simple, right? The book calls for gelatin in sheets, but after some research, I discovered this can only be purchased in gourmet bakery shops or online, so I furthered my research to find out how to substitute regular gelatin for the sheets. It's the same stuff, right?  

You're supposed to put the gelatin sheets in cold water to sit while you get the actual candy part going (the corn syrup and sugar and such) -- I measured out my gelatin crystals, poured the cold water over them, and promptly realized I had no way of separating the cold water from the gelatin. You see, you're supposed to just pull the sheets out and melt them. I had a bowl full of cold water, ice cubes, and millions of tiny little gelatin crystals.  Whoops.

Pressing on (what else could I do?), I mixed my sugar and corn syrup and left it on the stove to reach the proper temperature, and went on a mad search for something to strain the gelatin with. A sieve was, of course, way too porous, and a paper towel too flimsy. I finally settled on a dish towel that resembled cheesecloth, and crossed my fingers as I held it one-handed over a colander and slowly poured my gelatin-infested water over top.

It worked! Plenty of crystals still oozed through, but I had a nice big glob of gelatin stuck to the towel, and another smaller glob in the colander. Breathing a sigh of relief, I put the emancipated gelatin back into its Pyrex bowl, and melted it over a pot of steaming water on the stove.

The melted gelatin went into the mixer bowl with some additional corn syrup, then the melted corn syrup and sugar were added, and the KitchenAid mixed happily away for five minutes, which transformed the mixture into something amazingly resembling raw marshmallow ...


Image via Let Her Bake Cake

Just like that! In went the vanilla and salt for one minute on high, then the whole lot was poured into a greased 9x13 pan, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and left to sit for an agonizing six hours.

Filled with all sorts of doubts regarding potential failures, mostly connected to The Gelatin Incident, I washed four loads of laundry, read some of Great Expectations, and generally wished time away until I could know if I was, indeed, bionic woman enough to successfully make my own marshmallows.

Six hours later, I dusted my counter top with confectioner's sugar, ran a knife around the edge of my pan, and slowly, wondrously, pulled one giant 9x13 marshmallow out of the pan. It weighed a ton.


Image via Inspired Nest

I meticulously marked one-inch increments along the edge, and triumphantly sliced that giant mallow into over 90 smaller mallows, which were rolled in more confectioner's sugar, and stored nicely in a Tupperware, where they should keep at least a week -- if they last that long.

They are fantastic: sweet, but not sickening, the vanilla flavor is pleasantly strong, the texture springy and light, and they melted almost instantly in our hot chocolate.

I did take a nice picture of the completed mallows, but the file is being ornery, so you'll just have to take my word for it that my mallows do, in fact, look like this:



Image via This Week for Dinner

I have eaten one at least every time I've walked into the kitchen.

As the recipe I used is from a published book, I hesitate to detail it online, but a simple Google search will provide you dozens of recipes for mallows.

You can also buy the Baked marshmallows (or cookbook) online here.

Happy Mallow-ing!

Germs are Not for Sharing

You know what happens when you hang out with fifteen toddlers all day, wiping noses, changing diapers, preventing bites, and in general both loving on them and trying to keep the chaos to a minumum?

You get sneezed and coughed on daily, that's what happens.

Image via: http://preparednesspro.wordpress.com, illustration by Marieka Heilen

Which is why I'm at home sick today.