YAY Grace; What? Suffering?

Noticed this juxtaposition in yesterday's lectionary reading:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

As I look forward to celebrating Easter, this sounds AWESOME!! But the very next line is:

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

I get rejoicing in "the hope of the glory of God", but I'm honestly not yet at the point of rejoicing in my sufferings. The place where I might connect to this idea is in the following line:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

While I might not rejoice in suffering, I am aware that I am weak and ungodly and that Christ has been and will continue to work in me something I cannot do for myself. And if I can ever get to a place where I can rejoice in sufferings, I think it might start there.

~Passage from Paul's letter to Roman believers, chapter 5

That's a lot of failure

In the lectionary today:

After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.
~The good news according to John, chapter 5

Now let's assume the waters stirred daily and we take this guy as this word that he tried to get himself to the pool of water believing that if he was the first one in he would be healed. That's 365 days of failure each year times 38 years or 13870 failed attempts at healing. And even if he was disheartened and gave up and didn't even try 10% of the time, he DID try almost 12500 times and FAILED every time.

All I can think of is persistent desperation. And I wonder if I could handle that level of failure and I wonder if I would believe a guy who said, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”

I have no grand conclusions, but I'm totally in awe of this level of persistence and desperation.

Lenten reading

Here is part of the Daily Office from the BCP for today:

For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying,

“I will tell of your name to my brothers;
in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.”

And again,

“I will put my trust in him.”

And again,

“Behold, I and the children God has given me.”

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
~A Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 2

Chicken and Ashes

Ash Wednesday Collect
Almighty and everlasting God,
you hate nothing you have made
and forgive the sins of all who are penitent:
Create and make in us new and contrite hearts,
that we, worthily lamenting our sins
and acknowledging our wretchedness,
may obtain of you, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
~1979 Book of Common Prayer

Today begins the season of Lent, a time of fasting and mourning our sins as we look forward to celebrating the work of Jesus on the cross on Easter morning.

I was worried that the last post sounded too final, like I had arrived and figured things out. In his second recorded letter to believers in Corinthians, Paul writes to them about giving and calls it the "grace of giving". I need our annual giving tally, I need to list the recipients of these gifts because I need to be able to see that kind of grace in my life.

My dead heart is a hoarder. I have never worried about having food to eat or a roof over my head, but I do find myself running through what ifs. Having a giant pile of cash stashed in the bank makes me feel better, like I'm the master of my own universe. I do think that stewarding our money well by planning and saving is a good idea. But giving presses me into God reminding me that every good and perfect gift comes from him, reminding me that I am NOT the master of my own universe.

In my life, frugal choices have to be balanced with generosity because otherwise I'm just pretending I've got my world under control. When I see the tally of our giving and I experience the sting of "but I could've done X" with that money, I have the opportunity to remember that God has blessed us with abundance now, that my future "security" is not something I craft out of dollars in the bank, and that I have been invited to participate in God's greater work in the world.

Anyways, all that for 89 cent chicken, huh. Well, the start of Lent seems to be an appropriate time to remember and repent of the many ways that I am wretched and money is certainly one of those ways.

89 cent chicken and stewarding what we have

In the last post, I wrote about ways that I've been preparing whole chickens I get for 89 cents a pound. And then I thought to myself, "Why's it so important to me that the chicken is 89 cents a pound?" As it turns out, this is actually related to the year of "doing less". Doing less doesn't mean we're doing nothing. What I'm finding is that we're being drawn back over and over again to "stewarding what we have".

It's tax time here at our place and this ends up being our annual tally up how much we gave away assessment. We try to give away 15% of our gross income every year, but stuff comes up and we may give away more.

89 cent chicken instead of $3.99 chicken helps us to support:
Our local church that invests in us and our community
Friends who invested in us and are now missionaries in Thailand
A child in South America through Compassion Intl.
Friends who have been working to get kids off the streets in Tanzania
Friends who invested in me when I was a college student. One couple is now investing in post-college people and new teachers across the US and another is investing in college kids in Hungary.
Friends who work with the urban poor off my college campus.

I like doing this annual tally because I'm reminded why we didn't buy a fancier house, cooler, new gadgets, and hip furniture and why we do drive older cars and look for ways to spend less. Would it be nice to have our lives "tricked out"? Probably, for a while. But what means more to us is having relationships that are meaningful. We're not the most relationally savvy folk around, so we're grateful to the folk that have poured into us. And I think that's a good thing and something the Apostle Paul encouraged. We want to help them out as we can and right now that's financially. We have money and when we steward our money well, we get to participate in extending the kingdom of God far beyond what we could do with our own two hands and two feet.

Those are the thoughts for the day, more on doing less and stewarding what we have later.

The latest in whole chicken

So I discovered that my local Costco sells 2 whole chickens that are about 4 lbs each for 89 cents/lb. This is a great price to me and solves several issues in our kitchen: 1) a husband whose preferred meat is chicken and only the breasts 2) a wife (me) who prefers thighs if I'm going to eat chicken and 3) bones for soup stock. And I'll mention the 89 cents/lb again because well short of moving to eggs, tofu, and beans, none of which my husband eats, I'm not sure we can secure meat much cheaper.

So I've done a number of things in the cooking of whole chicken. I started with oven roasting whole chicken the low and slow way which Alton Brown has recommended. Results were fine as in I was happy with the moistness of the meat and the flavor from various seasonings. But low and slow requires a fair amt of preplanning. Then over Christmas I watched Jacque Pepin's youtube video on deboning a chicken and decided to try that. If you are him, you can do it in 5 minutes. It took me more like 20-30. Results on the grill were actually great, but I had a hard time figuring out what was dark meat and what was white meat. Given the above parameters, this was unacceptable. And 20-30 min of prep in chicken slime was a bit much. SOO...currently I'm butterflying/spatchcocking chicken. This is way easier than deboning and way faster than the low and slow method.

All I do is take a pair of scissors and cut out the backbone of the chicken. Trim off a little fat, flip the bird over and crack the breast bone. This allows the chicken to be flattened and ensures that I can have a cooked chicken in under an hr instead of the 3 or so hours with low and slow. So it's a touch more work that just seasoning a whole chicken but cooking time is greatly reduced. It's a ton less work than deboning entirely and I can still clearly identify all the meat parts. A happy compromise in my book.

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BTW the post that I've been ruminating about for several weeks as a follow up to the last post is what we're actually doing in our year of "doing less", but writing about chicken was easier today. So that's what I wrote about.