The Gratitude that Counts

January 14, 2020

Beloved:

          One by one, the baby adults have packed up and gone back to their usual lives.  The youngest took her dad with her for her last term of art school, so I am the sole human in the house for the next nine weeks.  So far I don’t hate it.  Last night, Carl and I talked on the phone while cooking our respective suppers and then exchanged pictures of our respective plates.  We also compare the weather:  he walked six miles in the 80-degree sunshine yesterday; I walked a few thousand steps inside my warm house.


          I’ve three intentions for my time alone.  The first is to feed myself well and cheaply.  The second is to read.  The third is to go to bed by 9 pm.  As if I am my own four-year-old.  Of course, we raise little kids this way for a reason – so they will be healthy and able to function at their best.  Go figure.

          Left to themselves, the four-year-olds I have known would feed themselves juice boxes and Oreos all day long, with a chicken nugget here and there.  They’d only sleep when they fell over from exhaustion and be hateful the last three hours before that.  Trade coffee for the juice boxes, fast food for the Oreos and voilà – the normal working adult.

          I can’t help but call it a spiritual matter:  either pride or a lack of gratitude.  It’s not like I’m curing cancer here.  I am pastoring a little flock of believers, doing for them what they can just as well do for each other.  They love and appreciate me, but they do not need me at the cost of my own health.  To think otherwise is prideful and probably deceitful, a way of avoiding some truth my self doesn’t want to hear.  Also, it’s simply ungrateful to mistreat this body of mine that works so hard every single day.  This beating heart, these pumping lungs, bones, muscles and a brain that keep going whether I feed and exercise them well or not.  It’s an offense to God to be anything less than grateful, and kind.  And according to the experts, cookies and television binges do not qualify.  Sleep and good food and, yes, even exercise, is the gratitude that counts.


          It’s a beautiful day to be alive.  May you be full of joy!  

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette

A cheap and yummy recipe I made up

• 1 pound ground turkey
  
• ½ an onion, diced
  
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
  
• ½ small head of cabbage, shredded
  
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
  
• 3 tbsp tomato paste
  
• 1 can diced tomatoes in their liquid
  
• 2 cans dark kidney beans
  
• 1 cup frozen corn
  
• 1 cup frozen green beans
  
• 2 tbsp Italian seasoning - or whatever you want
  
• 1-2 cups vegetable or chicken broth
  

Brown turkey meat in oil in a pot, add onion, cabbage, carrots, and garlic and cook until tender.  Add in everything else and cook about 20 minutes.  It can be soup or stew, depending on how much broth you add.  Freezes really well.