Some times you come to understand something radical, something new.  Sometimes you have a gradual incline in understanding that results in a mountain peak of truth.  Today I think I both broke through to truth and reached a summit by which I could see new truths, all at once.

It began when I started to teach on the nature of evil at the beginning of this semester.  It started out as an intellectual and theological joy, this pursuit of deeper understanding, but it planted a root in me that today came to fruition.  As we started our study on the Fall of humanity in Adam and Eve, we took some time to discuss what evil is, and where it comes from.  Men with oceans of intellect stronger than mine can’t answer this question fully, but what we did arrive at is this: God is not just the definition of good, He IS good.  Therefore evil is what God is not, evil is the absence of God, evil is the vacuum of rejection of God.

I took away a profound realization from this study.  And by realization I mean something that I always knew, but that actually realized, or became real, in my everyday life and thinking.  That realization was this: we deserve evil.  We deserve what we get.  We chose it.  We were presented with God, with goodness itself, and we chose evil.  We created the Fall, and therefore we should not be surprised by suffering, because when we rejected God we chose a world without Him and, therefore, without His goodness.

What we should be surprised by is God’s goodness in the midst of a broken world that rejected Him.  By His presence.

And that is what today became real in my heart.  That God is present in the very absence of Himself. God is here, present, in the world that rejected Him, in the world that we chose to fill with evil which is the absence of all God’s goodness.

He is still there.  In Death, there is Life.

God’s goodness through suffering is not simply what we can find to benefit from in a worldly sense in our pain.  For example, it is not just when someone is saved as a result of our pain; it is not just when someone is helped by our suffering that God’s goodness even in pain is apparent.  Those things are bonus and incredibly wonderful, but we should not rely on them for seeing God’s goodness in our suffering.

God’s goodness through suffering is that He is present in it.  That He is there at all.  That He is there by our side when we hurt.

I don’t have to see the worldly result of His goodness through suffering.  I delight in it and rejoice when I see it.  But it is enough for me that He chooses, undeserved by me, to be there when I am experiencing the consequences of my sin and of the sinful world I helped to create.  When the pain that no one’s sin but my own (directly through action or indirectly through my participation in Adam’s Fall) brought on myself comes, I am in awe of the God that chooses to re-enter this broken world through His Son and stand by me.

But it doesn’t stop there.  God isn’t just present in our pain, he participated in them.  In Christ’s wounds I see how much he loved me, that to be with me he participated in the suffering that my sin helped to bring into the world.

My suffering is valid.  The sin of the world is supposed to hurt.  But like my Dad did when I was a child, holding and kissing me after a spanking, loving me even as he punished me; so is God my strength even to bear the punishments for our sin.  Even the punishments of pain, and death, and anguish.  And he is so good that someday he will take away even those.

It is enough.  How can it not be enough, when I don’t deserve any of it?  What more could I want than God’s presence?  It is enough.

I’m not attempting to tread fine theological roads here, I am just trying to express a truth in terms that we can understand and in a way that we can hang onto when we’re hurting.

Avoiding coffee, sodas, energy drinks and regular tea (I drink herbal tea and water almost exclusively) means that I rely completely on myself to overcome the energy slump.  It also means that I need more sleep than people who can grab a cup of joe in the morning.  Well, I don’t biologically need more than they do, but rather I need sleep more to function as effectively as coffee drinkers do.

I reserve caffeinated coffee for special occasions.  Sometimes this is reasonable, such as a long drive at night.  But the other special occasion is… when I want to be happy.

Because my mood is severely affected by how much sleep I’ve had, having a cup of coffee cheers me up immensely and makes me a better companion.  So if I’m feeling down, I often drink coffee at a party or at a social event to pick me up and make me cheerier.  If I’m having a bad day, I turn to coffee.  (I’m probably weird in this, since most people drink coffee more often.  This is a personal problem, not one I think anyone else has with coffee).

Do you realize what I just admitted?  If I said that I drink wine or beer to make myself feel better when I’m sad, your ears would probably be pricking up in concern.  But when I say I drink coffee when I’m depressed, you don’t bat an eye.

While I’m probably alone in using coffee for this, we do this all the time with food, chocolate, tv, movies, too.  And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with curling up in front of a good movie at the end of a rough day, especially since sometimes it just helps you to rest, unwind, and the problems in your own head prove to be nothing important once you gain some perspective and some rest.

But sometimes I use it to pretend that my problems don’t exist.  To avoid them, ignore them.  I did this all the time when I struggled with OCD.  And I catch myself doing it now sometimes – in weird ways, like reaching for a cup of coffee before teaching instead of praying about teaching.  Instead of leaning on God as the first line of defense, I turn to something else.  It could be coffee, it could be a treat, it could be a favorite tv show – but something innocent and fun is turned into something insidious and dangerous when it means that I ignore God in that moment.

What else is in our lives that seems so innocent and normal, like my drinking coffee, is our favorite stronghold?

Psalm 59:16
But I will sing of your strength; I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning. For you have been to me a fortress and a refuge in the day of my distress.

I’m just going to come out and say it – it’s hard to have convictions, especially when those convictions are counter-cultural.  When you try to stretch your dollars; when you try to reach your children’s hearts and not just actions; when you try to eat whole foods; when you try to fill your mind with intelligent, wise thoughts; when you try to go against the culture – it’s hard.

I get very frustrated when I read frugal blogs or money saving blogs and the women that write them are constantly screaming at you (through the use of too many exclamation marks and overcapitalization, which seems to be a major problem on many of these blogs and Pinterest articles) that they can’t imagine how ANYbody could possibly spend more than $200 a month on groceries and life is so much SIMPLER this way and to actually pay FULL price for an item is just UNTHINKABLE I mean who could POSSIBLY actually want to buy mayonnaise at MORE than 50 CENTS???!!!!!!

I’ll be honest – I would so much rather pay full price.  I would so much rather walk into a grocery store and buy the highest quality item at whatever price it happens to be at that moment.  It’s much, much harder to try to pinch pennies and make things yourself.  The whole idea that eating at home is more satisfying than eating out just doesn’t resonate with me.  I’d much rather eat out at Panera, because they make a better salad than me – or Maggiano’s, because they make a better pasta than me.  And really, the fact that I didn’t have to dirty pots and pans and dishes means that it tastes infinitely better than even my best recipe.  So no, it is not really always more enjoyable to eat dinner at home than out.

Since I am fully aware that many of my (and my husband’s) convictions are intensely personal and not shared by many other thoughtful, godly people, I can also get awfully jealous.  People who don’t feel convicted about Christian education get to send their kids to school for free.  People who don’t feel convicted about children in church can put their kids in the nursery and actually pay attention in the service.  People who don’t feel convicted about TV shows get to watch the Bachelor/Bachelorette (which my husband recently banned me from doing).  People who don’t feel convicted about whole foods cooking can buy premade frozen meals and enjoy the ease of making them.

I have multiple friends who don’t use microwaves.  That sounds hard.  Sometimes I’ll bet they wish they could just pop something in the microwave.  I have friends who compost.  That sounds hard.  I’ll bet they’d say it was easier to just throw things in the trash.

If I were to pretend that trying to teach a 13-month-old to sit through a sermon were easy and any other way was unthinkable, I would be lying.  Perhaps some people are so passionate about certain things that the thought of doing anything else seems outrageous and stupid.  And if you are, that must make your life easier – but don’t discourage others who aren’t always excited about following their convictions.  I’m not tempted to put my children into public school, but I cannot possibly deny that it would be cheaper and easier than homeschooling or Christian schooling.  Most of the time, MY way of doing things seems outrageous to me.

None of this is to say that following your convictions is not satisfying.  But satisfying is very different from easy.

In the end, I think that this post is really about encouraging us all to accept that we are all at different places in our convictions.  We need to be each other’s cheerleaders towards their own convictions, not towards ours.  We need to have understanding that other people may not find things as easy as we do.  We also need to acknowledge when it’s hard to do what we think is right or better, because pretending that it’s easy as pie is only confusing and frustrating to much of the rest of the world.  When we don’t agree, we still need to support and be reasonable.  I am thankful that recently I’ve been able to chat with a couple of friends who support, advise, and listen to my convictions even though they don’t share every aspect of them.  I hope that I can turn around and do that for another.

It’s way better and it’s cheap.  I could drive to the store and spend $3 on a box of Wheat Thins or I could have them right now in my own kitchen.  Work?  Yes.  Better?  Yes.

I’m trying this new way.  I’ve always been a whole-foods sort of person and I really love to do things myself.  But it’s not always cheaper, at least up front (buying tahini and dried garbanzo beans is pretty pricey at the start, even though you get your money’s worth over time), and I’ve always maintained that my time is often as valuable as my money.  And I will hold that that is a valid excuse forever.

But right now I’m trying to do some more things myself because, to be honest, I need to be a little bit more resourceful around the house.  And it’s really, really satisfying to be able to look into a kitchen and pantry full of yummy, hearty things and know that it’s the fruit of your own labors.

But let’s face it, it’s hard.  Sandwiches for lunch and salads as a dinner side; cereal for breakfast and ice cream for dessert are so ingrained into our mentalities that it’s almost impossible to think of something else.  And let’s be real, who wants to cook every single meal of the day from scratch?  It’s exhausting.

But my parents blessed me by buying me a big, fat chest freezer and I’m trying hard to fill it up.  A day or two of hard hard work every week or two means way better in-between periods, and it comes back down to that old attitude I’ve mentioned before that sacrificing now often means easy street later.  So in trying to buy less cereal and deli meats and milk, I’d been scrambling every morning and noon time trying to come up with something, anything to eat and stressed beyond belief.  But after spending a short weekend compiling breakfast burritos, muffins, premade steel cut oatmeal and granola bars, cookie dough and vegetable stews, baby fruits and lentil purees, I now wake up every morning happy in the knowledge that there’s something hearty and delicious for every meal of the day.

The real point of this post is to invite you to follow my Pinterest boards in the hopes of inspiring others to take the kitchen back into their own hands.  I’ve been putting together some of the best recipes out there on the web for the simple things we never think to make ourselves (like tortillas and naan); practical dinners; cereal and sandwich alternatives; and drool-worthy recipes for when you JUST NEED SOMETHING RICH.  These are all only my ideas, though – everything that I’ve made and liked I move over to the tested and loved board, so you know which recipes meet my approval :).  Check it out!

They haven’t yet developed a sense of the ridiculous.

They are also just so concerned with themselves that they really don’t have the time of day for worrying about whether or not they are really plain old silly.

Do you also ever stop and think about what we dress these kiddos up in?  Cupcakes, sparkles, ruffles on the butt and giant bows in their hair.

Personally, I love the incongruity of Ida’s little fat chubby legs and take-me-seriously face.  I love the crocodile tears dripping down onto a frilly shirt with hippos all over it.  Sometimes in a moment of “parenting” I need the sight of Ida’s little booty crawling/marching away in frustration, emblazoned with a giant pink satin heart, to remind me to lighten up and remember just how fun it is to be a stay-at-home-mommy.

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