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September 17, 2024 Beloved: One Monday a month I cook almost all day. Meal prepping is the trendy word for it. But mostly, it’s because for the life of me I cannot figure out how to cook for just one person. The few years I cooked for two are now a distant memory. The nearly two decades I cooked for five are what’s embedded in my brain now. When the kids were growing and eating like horses, I was at the grocery store every other day and cooked supper every night. What leftovers were left weren’t left long. When two of my kids swam competitively, they ate supper twice a day, drank six gallons of milk a week, and leftovers were not a thing. First of all, it’s hard to shop for one, to buy just one chicken breast, two parsnips and three carrots, as my recipes yesterday required. I could do it, I suppose, if I wanted to shop the butcher’s case and a produce stand. And sell some plasma on the way in order to fund such high end fare. The beef stew I made called for a three pound roast. I could cut it down to a single serving - but I’m not sure even the butcher shop is going to sell me a six-ounce cut of chuck roast. So I made the whole recipe for about $30, or $5 a serving, and froze all but the one I’ll eat for lunch today. Far richer food than I could buy anywhere else for $5. Prideful, I’ll admit, is how I feel to see my little freezer stacked with containers of homemade food. But also, deeply grateful. Grateful too, for the food, the freezer, the farmer and the grocer. For the truck drivers and logisticians who move all this food from field to store. Grateful especially for the congregation who employs me and maintains just working conditions, so I have both the money and the time required to take good care of myself. I haven’t checked but I wonder if any of the meal prep content creators on social media have noted that that whole idea rests in privilege: in having the money to buy, the time to prepare and the space to store batches of meals? I’d bet my favorite pen no single parent working two minimum wage jobs to pay rent and feed her kids spends $150 and an entire day meal prepping. ($150 wouldn’t buy much for a family with kids when eggs are $3.42 a dozen!*) All of which is to say, I’ve tried to dial back on the pridefulness, trade it for another dose of humility in recognition of the privilege I did not earn so much as inherit and with which I must sit lightly, and responsibly. First of all, by not wasting food. Also, sharing it whenever I get the chance. I can also eat less - three meals daily is not a world-wide phenomenon, nor is meat at every meal. At any meal with meat, I am trying to pile on the green stuff. The cheaper green stuff, which is not my favorite but I’m working on it. I’ll eat the beef stew poured over spinach. The recipe below includes something I can’t believe I just discovered: stirring tahini** and balsamic vinegar together to drizzle over cooked green beans. Honestly I think I might eat corn cobs if they were doused in this concoction. As well, stirring tahini gives your arm muscles a workout, so there is that.  I tripled the amount of green beans. Next time I’ll add mushrooms too. Tofu would work in place of chicken. It’s really, really good, and not wildly expensive. Rice would stretch it even more. Eating is so fundamental to existence and yet we are easily convinced it is a chore to be done with as quickly as possible. Even if you don’t spend hours at a time making ready, I pray some part of your day contains time and space to be grateful for how fortunate you are, for food to eat and people with whom to eat it. Hardly anything else is so deeply human. ~ peace and prayers, pastor annette *A quick internet comparison of Kroger, Walmart and Aldi’s showed Walmart's best price, non-organic, certainly not cage free, eggs at $3.42, compared to $3.77 at Aldi’s and $3.79 at Kroger. From there prices jump to over $4 all the way to $8 a dozen for some organic, cage free eggs. The average price a year ago was $2.80. Something like a 35% increase just to the lowest local. It’s like my mortgage going up $528 in one year. I’d have to cash out my retirement, or move. **Tahini is roasted sesame seeds, oil and salt - emulsified like peanut butter, only much stiffer.  September 10, 2024
Beloved: I am so sorry to disappear without warning for two whole weeks but I suddenly had better things to do, specifically a new grandbaby, who came 18 days before his due date. To quote Mary Poppins, he’s practically perfect in every way and his mama is doing well too. His sister, who turns 3 today, was my main responsibility along with meals, laundry and dogs, and is completely in love with her brother, though she has made it clear, I don’t like this crying. I lived at their house a week and have come and gone since, but we are all settling into the wonder of a whole new human being in our midst. Ah, change – the greatest delight and deepest distress of life. Depending entirely upon if we chose to change or if change chose us. We may actively anticipate change the way families prepare for a new baby, “nesting” it’s called. Other times life goes from sugar to salt in the time it takes to cross the room or to read a single text message. In both, sweetness is to be found on the other side of the transition. The difference is how long it takes. A pediatrician I know says the four-month checkup is when they notice families with a newborn are usually into their new normal. Two years, more or less, is what therapists tell clients recovering from divorce. After seven years, the death of a child begins to soften in the hearts and minds of parents. Soften, not recover or heal, just soften. But truth be told, each person’s healing or transition after change takes as long as it takes. No matter how well we plan nor how great a surprise the change, our hearts’ and minds’ adjustment is real. New habits and routines take time, longer still if trauma has occurred. Even a welcome new baby comes with some trauma to their mama! A therapist once told me that human beings seem to have a built-in resistance to change. I notice it in my tendency to be excited about a big trip until the week before I leave, then I don’t want to go. I get anxious about packing and travel logistics. Once I’m on the way, I’m excited again but for those few days I feel the inertia that wants me stuck in the self that hasn’t gone new places, seen new sights, met new people, done new things. That is, the self that hasn’t changed. The simple-but-not-so-easy solution is to keep packing and drive to the airport, the ordinary tasks of moving forward while being gentle with my fearful self all the while. She is going to be fine. Better than fine, actually. She is going to be amazing. Whatever change you are facing or is facing you, keep going. Keep going through the ordinary motions this day requires, and be as tenderhearted and kind to yourself as you can. I look forward to seeing you at our regular programming this week. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette “ . . .this life is but the childhood of our immortality.” August 27, 2024 Beloved: The quote isn’t from a Christian devotional but a novel about CIA activity in Vietnam, as the main character, an undercover operative, reflects on his mother’s recent death. He is not a Christian, but she was. Fervently so, to his embarrassment until she died, when he finds himself hoping all she believed turned out to be true, if for her sake only. Nine words. Nine words, all of which I use regularly and have never once strung together in this particular order, an order which slayed me outright when I saw it on the page. We call it fiction and yet, there it is: profound spiritual truth tucked inside a novel about the CIA in Vietnam in 1968. He’s thirty years old. His daddy was killed at Pearl Harbor. His uncle is a war hero and his mentor. Disillusion and disappointment in his country and in humanity are hurtling toward him and he doesn’t even know it. This life is but the childhood of our immortality will most certainly find its way into my funeral liturgies from now on. The collapse of years between a short life and a long one in the span of immortality. Each life is a full one, no matter how much time it occupied nor the sum of breaths it drew. Which is to say, the very best this life has to give is knowledge of itself – that we are alive, have been and always will be. This existence is but a glimpse. Nothing is ordinary, or maybe what seems most ordinary is positively loaded with the universe itself, the stuff of immortality. A bird on a branch. A cat on a step. A toddler coloring. All of it positively exploding with life. Glory barely concealed in the most daily business of human activity. Stay indoors if you can today, friends, and be glad you don’t live in Las Vegas, where the temp is predicted to be 104. We’ll only get to 95. I pray the day is kind to you all. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Note: * Pastor Annette is away from work most Saturdays and all Mondays. Apart from emergencies, calls and messages received these days will be returned and answered on Tuesdays. Thanks!
August 20, 2024 Beloved: Having a much busier than usual Tuesday and a terrible case of writer’s block, I went looking for an August column from years gone by and came across this one about Rosie Cotton, the second of the four golden retrievers who came to live with our family. We lost her in 2022. She was the sweetest soul. Here she is as a pup and about a year before she died. Enjoy!
August 9, 2016
Beloved: Rereading old journals I came across a memory of Rosie Cotton who is now the older of our golden retrievers, from when she was just a baby. Rosie Cotton is in deep denial regarding her tennis ball addiction. Convinced there’s a ball in the powder room, she accidentally shuts the door while searching. Stuck in the bathroom, she sings like a heartsick coyote until someone lets her out. At first she’s joyful, but the cravings soon return and she is powerless over them. She cries to get back in. If I keep the door shut, she cries some more. Rosie has no desire to change nor any idea how she keeps getting stuck. How many times a day do I find myself stuck in a loop of negative thinking, deprecating myself and others? Or turning to habits and appetites that numb the ordinary stresses of living? Or to conversations that edify none, but taste so delicious in the moment? Epiphany! The lesson isn’t about sin, but grace. As our powerlessness grows, so we grow ever nearer to the Loving One who is on pins and needles, delirious with the desire to open the door and escort us to the divine reality of our helplessness and God’s grace. I pray this day finds you living fully in the grace of God. peace & prayers, ~ pastor annette  August 13, 2024
Beloved: I love how a hummingbird up close sounds like a helicopter way off. They’ve finally arrived at my feeders, four months past when they usually show up. My neighbor speculates it may be due to insecticides being sprayed on our lawns. The worker must have sneezed when spraying near my flower bed, because some of my lavender got hit and died alongside the broadleaf. Next year we are going to put up little “do not spray” flags on what sad grass we have. My milkweed still doesn’t have any caterpillars on it either, another clue that the good bugs may have up and left the neighborhood. The point is, the hummers are finally here, hovering around my flowerbeds in the front and my screen porch in the back, resting on the arch of the shepherd's hook which holds the waterer and the suet feeder. I put a wire fence around it because the mower ran too close and hooked himself like a sheep. He likes to mow really fast. It’s only August 13th but I can feel the summer winding down. The end of every season makes me just a little sad, no matter how much I love the next one. And I love them all. Each reminds me of ones before – like this end of summer picture I took years ago in the garden of my previous house. I loved that garden and think about it often. I wonder if it remembers me. Do hummingbirds still come and go from the perennials I planted, drinking grass and flowers never sprayed with poison? I like thinking so. I live here now, in a place becoming more precious by the day. I have dirt to dig and feeders to fill, neighbors with whom to share the small news of the day. I am safe and loved and watched over by more people than I remember to thank. And finally, the hummingbirds arrive in their own time to hallow this season, this house, and my life with that up-close-way-off music of their tiny wings, to remind me that as much as some things change, certain things never do. For which I am more grateful than I have words. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette  August 6, 2024
Beloved: This thirteen minute film was extra interesting to me this morning. I hope you are able to see and will take the necessary thirteen minutes to watch this Swedish film in which ordinary people are challenged to overcome their fear and self-doubt by stepping off a 33-foot diving platform into a swimming pool. I found it enormously interesting to see them work up their own courage and encourage each other, or to give in to their fear. If it were a cliff into a lake or rushing water, I’d likely be too afraid. But easily do I imagine being able to leap into clear water where the pool floor is visible. My almost three year old granddaughter likes looking for snapping turtles in a leftover quarry at Woolery Mill when we shop at the Saturday morning farmer’s market. She doesn’t like my vice-like grip on her wrist when we stand on the limestone blocks around the pool. I may be looking for turtles, but what I see most clearly is her bending for a closer look then tumbling six or eight feet into that reedy, slimy water and me jumping in right behind her, no doubt breaking my ankle, again. Because I would jump. Of course I would jump, and a whole crew of firefighters would have to haul me out in front of the crowd who gathered to see the grammy with the algae in her hair hoisted back on land. I’d miss that farmers’ market too. They have lovely coffee. But seriously, this whole movie plays out in my mind every time we look for turtles there. Jumping in to catch your grandkid isn’t courage, it’s what people do, and hopefully not just for their own, nor just for kids. Even if it’s come to count for courage in a world of hyperindividualism, hopefully for folks of faith some remnant remains of the connection between community and courage, between our own lives and our life together. We ARE our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. No one is getting through this world on their own. No one. Most days, the greater part of courage may be accepting our dependence on and need for one another. Then living accordingly, by serving others and letting ourselves be served, as the days demand. If only, amen? If only we could concede our need of our neighbors, how much less might we wish them harm, or worse? All I know to do is practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. Like the ringer at the end of the Swedish film. To trust God’s grace as completely as they trust the water to catch them would be faith made perfect, it seems to me. I pray this day finds you held in the grace of God’s goodness to us all. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette
says no eggs yet, but the monarchs will likely find them soon. My own yard could take days and days of steady rain like this so I can just imagine what farmers wish-hope-pray for in such weather. Their heads must be full of math, factoring time and cost to pinpoint the day when their water bills exceed the profit on the very crops upon which that water falls. I could stop watering today and lose some flowers, a few tomatoes and even fewer peppers. They could lose their farm.
Balance is everything . . . in everything. Not just growing food and flowers, but spirit too. Like in nature, the boundaries within which we might get spiritual life right are huge, enormous, vast. There is no single way of growing tomatoes or hydrangeas. Nor of being faithful. Each life has their own set of trouble and trauma to navigate, and from which to heal. As we heal ever so slowly in one area, we may grow by leaps and bounds in another and incur new sorrow in still another. Such is the way of things in nature, our own lives included. All of which is accounted for in the will of God, I trust. What if God is more kindly and patient with us than we are with ourselves? What would it mean to work this notion into our thinking, praying, believing selves like working compost into clay? That no believer’s life is perfect, end to end, top to bottom, back to front – any more than any garden anywhere is in full bloom everywhere? Both are constant works in progress. Both are dependent on factors out of the believer’s (gardener’s) control. Both necessitate the long view, the recognition that neither work is ever completed, but rather joined for the season we are given, learning to receive with grace whatever grace comes our way: rain and sun, work and rest, food and flowers. All in their own time. July 23, 2024 Beloved: I usually attach the recipe like an afterthought but this one was soooo good. Only now I’m wondering if it was the food or that moment in time that was so satisfying. Marco Polo, the Uyghur (pronounced Wee-Gur) restaurant on Grant Street was our original plan but it was closed yesterday so we decided to come home and cook. I had just saved this newspaper recipe and between my freezer, fridge and garden, we had everything to make it, with the adjustments noted in parentheses (in the recipe below). The largest adjustment being I don’t own a grill. And by we, I mean my son Ben. He’s the best kind of cook, with the brain of a scientist, the knife skills of a sous chef and the heart of a home cook. The most unpretentious foodie ever, he just loves to feed people good food. We are of one mind about fresh corn - that frozen is cheaper, faster and more consistently better tasting. We throw extra things that sound good to us. Cilantro and jalapeno almost always sound good to us.  Mostly I fetched things from the garden, cleaned up behind him and listened to him talk: about the presidential election, stories about his friends in DC, his impending move to New York. I’ve been listening to him talk for a long, long time. Only during his Star Wars phase, around age five or six, did I sometimes get the teensiest bit antsy with his enthusiasm for all things Tatooine. Then I’d say, Oh darn, Ben, my shields are up. I can’t hear you, and I’d catch a little break. Otherwise, listening to him talk has been one of life’s most precious gifts to me. As much fun as having little kids was, I love the amazing grownups they have become. They are good people: good to themselves, good to each other, good to their friends and good to people in need they come across. They care about the world and do good work in it. They have always been sweet to me, but especially these last two years, their goodness has poured like honey on my heart,* enabling me to carry on in their good company and light. I’ll
So, maybe this is the best chicken ever, or maybe it is just average. But good company makes average meals amazing, don’t you know. If you don’t make this, make something. Or order in. Then gather with some people you love around a table someplace quiet with nothing else to do but eat and talk and listen. See if it isn’t the best thing you’ve tasted in forever. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette *Honey on my heart is a saying I picked up from Dalia Owino years ago, for being deeply relieved by the kindness of others. Another, “_______ just burns my brain,” from Dalia’s niece Mary Elizabeth, in reference to Algebra II, or anything that makes you think so hard your head aches.  Grilled Chicken Thighs and Corn With Lime-Basil Butter
By Clare de Boer * NYT Cooking * Published July 12, 2024 * Yield:4 servings
Step 1 ~ Place the chicken thighs in a large bowl and season with the garlic, olive oil, 1 ¾ teaspoons salt and juice of 1 lime. Toss to coat. Let marinate at room temperature while the grill heats up or, ideally, refrigerate, covered, overnight. (Yeah, we didn’t marinate - but agreed it would have improved it.) Step 2 ~ To make the lime-basil butter, place the butter, lime zest, ¾ cup basil leaves, ¼ teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper in a food processor and whizz until basil is chopped and incorporated. Refrigerate overnight or leave out of the fridge if you’re ready to grill. (Nope, not this either - but it’s a great idea if you are the kind who plans ahead.) Step 3 ~ When ready to cook, light the grill to medium-high. If needed, remove the chicken and lime-basil butter from the fridge and place the butter near the grill so it softens. Place the ears of corn on one side of the grill, turning every 3 minutes or so, until cooked through and lightly charred, 10 to 20 minutes total. Pull the corn off the grill and slice off the charred kernels. Place them on a serving platter and top with some of the basil butter. (We did all this in a second skillet, cooking the corn concoction, then adding the butter and getting it all hot and yum.) Step 4 ~ While the corn is cooking and being sliced, place the chicken on the grill flat sides down. Char until it releases from the grates easily, 5 to 7 minutes. Rotate the chicken slightly, without flipping, to get more color on the first side. Pay attention to how the color develops and when areas of the first side become chestnut in color and look delicious, flip the chicken and grill for another 3 to 5 minutes. Continue rotating and flipping every few minutes until the chicken is cooked through. To check if the chicken is cooked, poke a knife into the thickest part of the meat. The juices should run clear and the meat should no longer be translucent. (We seared the chicken stove top then to the oven uncovered to sizzle and bake to 165 degrees. Take out and let it rest a few minutes.) Step 5 ~ Remove the chicken from the grill, slice each thigh in half across its widest part and place slices on top of the corn. Spoon the remaining basil butter on top of the hot chicken and sprinkle over remaining basil leaves, the remaining lime juice and flaky salt. Grind some extra black pepper over the top. (We didn’t slice it. We plated it from the stove with a layer of corn, then a chicken thigh, chopped cilantro, salt and pepper. Sliced tomatoes on the side) Note: The corn is great all on its own - double or triple the amount for awesome potluck.
I never learned of what E. was so afraid. She actually likes most bugs, but I reckon the name BugMan sounds pretty villainous to her ears.** And she’s hardly alone in her terror of things that sound true. I can barely read the news these days, for the anxiety churned in me. The mendacity and violence terrorizing our culture are difficult to reject in favor of the life of hope and peace and service offered by our faith. Giving in to the paralysis of fear is just easier sometimes, and it’s always a choice, of course. But never a solution, especially for we who claim our being in Christ (Ephesians 1:3-14). When the news sends us into panic, just like the toddler with her grandmother, we can cling to the promises and presence of God, whose kingdom never fails. Our primary citizenship is in this kingdom where power’s purpose is service to the least among us and liberty reigns for everyone all the time. In this kingdom all the faith and hope and courage we will ever need is stockpiled, not so that we won’t be afraid, no, so we can help. So that when we read the news, we read it with the lament appropriate to a world coming undone, with the faith that our lives are secure in the will of God for humanity, with the hope of a future not determined by the fickle politics and powers of this world and with the courage of people who have nothing in this world to fear. We are victims of nothing or nobody this side of heaven, friends. We have everything we need to work for the good and right and decent way of life God intends for all creation, humanity most of all. The way this world is need not be the way this world continues. Not if people with the heart and mind of Christ can take hold of ourselves and the faith we already claim. I pray this week is kind to you and you find opportunities to love your neighbor, hugely. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
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I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
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September 2024
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