Blackberry-Orange Iced Cream

...not "ice cream"...it's iced cream.  So, so good.  This is an easy recipe, very hospitality-friendly.  By that, I mean that you put just enough love into it...more effort and time than running out to the store for an angel food cake and berries - less hands-on time than it takes to make, say, a from-scratch, home made pie. Guests like it when there is just enough love put into something to make them know they are special, but not so much as to make them feel like you are trying too hard to impress them.

take 2 cups of fresh blackberries, 1/4 cup of orange juice and 1/4 cup orange marmalade, along with 2 TB sugar.  Combine in a heavy saucepan...

...and bring it to a boil.  Boil it for 3 minutes, stirring constantly.  Then let it cool completely.  In a large bowl (I use my Kitchenaid mixer), beat 2 cups of heavy whipping cream into soft peaks.  Add 1/4 cup of confectioner's sugar.  Fold in the berry mixture, and chill until time to serve.  I freeze this in a container, and then bring it out to soften a little before serving. 

   

Very, very fresh, creamy taste.  Not overly sweet whatsoever.  Yum!

In Which Sheila Chats About Medical Science and the Gospel

The jury is in.  We have proof that "as a woman thinks in her heart, so is she".  Medical science has verified what the Bible has always told us about the heart being the seat of choice, imagination, and emotion.

And every emotion releases its own chemical into the bloodstream, for health or for harm.  There is not a thought you can think that does not carry with it an effect on your body.

It is no mystery where migraines and fibromyalgia and back pain comes from.  First the cause, then the effect.  We are literally making ourselves sick, bathing ourselves at a cellular level in negativity, criticism, and depression.  The chemicals released correspond to the emotion.  The emotion corresponds to the thought.

I take it a step further and deeper.  I say:  your every thought is conceived from a basis of what you believe about God.

Bottom line.

After spending hours reading over the groundbreaking work of neuroscientist Candace Pert, and digesting the research of Dr. Caroline Leaf, I am jumping up and down in a frenzy of cross-application.

The poet Robert Frost said that intelligence is a feat of association.  God has wired my brain to make connections across seemingly incongruous ideas.  I can get revelation into the ekklesia when I read about sea turtles.  This ability to connect is both a blessing and a curse.  It sometimes makes me darn near inscrutable when I try to explain where I am coming from.

Friends, you are so what you think about.  You aren't merely becoming what you choose to focus on, you already are.  You already are who you are going to be.  The only answer for every woman is to repent - changing our mind should be a way of life.

The only hope for change in the life, is a change in the mind.

I'll say it again:  Lady - change your mind!

You better be stuffing the good news of the gospel into your brain, beginning day before yesterday!  You better be about the full time business of renewing your mind, else you become a jaded, cynical woman who cannot change her mind to (literally) save her life.

No wonder the devil gets upset when grace is fully and purely preached.  What we believe about God is either the truth that sets us free, or clever lies, posing as truth...lies that imprison us.

Scientists have isolated and named the one thing all negativity springs from:  fear.  God has always known this.  He said, "She who fears has not been made mature in love." 

Oh, how He loves us!  How He loves us, oh!  He surrounds us, and He is love and grace and mercy.  He requires nothing from us that He has not first provided for us in Jesus Christ.

If you struggle with the  doctrines of grace, you struggle at the core.  My heart breaks for you.  When, when will you tire of the veil that shrouds your spiritual understanding?  When, when will you properly diagnose your relational dysfunction, your physical disease, your utter weariness of soul?  When, when will you be honest?

See, your brain is "always watching you".  Your brain knows what you actually think and believe.  Sounds a lot like the Bible when it says, "No man knows the thoughts of a man, save the spirit of man that is in him..."

Whenever your life is at cross purposes with what you truly think, whenever you invent your own version of events, every time you pretend, the heart knows.  Go on and spend the rest of your life justifying it or covering it up - it will come out in another form, usually pain in your body.  The only remedy is to wash your mind clean with the Word - making what you think line up with the only sure plumb line in the universe:  God's thoughts.

They are not your thoughts.  You have to get outside yourself to think a God-thought.  Your first reaction is usually not a God-thought.  Your opinion is usually not a God-thought.  Your finest effort on your finest day is not His way.  The heart knows, each and every time you fall short of the glory of God.

Medical science proves that we must be washed, day in and day out, Sunday in and Sunday out, with good news.  Dendrites don't form strong and true any other way.  A topical sermon here and there, brushing up against the gospel but rarely grasping it and examining it at life-long-lengths is not enough to form even the physical connections across synapses, much less a transformed soul.

It's why you are okay one day, and not okay the next.  It is why you hurt.  You haven't lingered over what is true, lovely, and of good news to you.

The jury is in.  You must understand how very much you are loved.  It will be health to your bones.

Hospitality

"...you will do well to send them on their way well cared for, as is right for servants of God:For they went out for love of the Name...So it is right for us to take in such men as guests, so that we may take our part in the work of the true faith."
(III John 1:6,7,8)

We've had overnight guests for the last several days.  Joe and Yvonne Ewen from Scotland, along with Ted Lyke from south Florida, and others who have drifted in and out for meals and fellowship.  My daughter Sarah and her husband have hosted several guests overnight at their home all this week.

One translation of the above Scripture says of hospitality to a guest is to "bring them forward after a Godly sort..."

Just bring them forward.  For a few brief hours or days, spirit touches spirit, life touches life, and all are blessed, our guest is "brought forward after a Godly sort", and sent on their way feeling loved and cared for.

Hospitality is taking part in the work of true faith.  Tim and I, as hosts, become part of every sinner brought closer to Christ, every saint who is encouraged and edified, we are considered by God to be a significant part of each and every bit of it.

There were ten around my dinner table tonight.  That's not unusual.  It is lots of work, but the rewards are absolutely out of proportion to the labor.  Huge reward.

Late last night, maybe even the wee hours of the morning, I was aware of the presence of God as I was falling asleep.  It hit me, as I lay there, that every bedroom in our home was full, two in each one, plus a dear friend who was sleeping on the couch.  All these precious people, slumbering peacefully and safely under our roof, under our watch.  Everything was still and quiet, but for the sound of the cicadas and the faint relaxing sound of the waterfall that pours into our pond outside.  I was so, so tired from all the activity of the day, but it was "the good kind of tired", and falling asleep with the house full-to-bursting was the best part.

Tonight will be much the same.  I'm not sure if the couch will be occupied or not, but if it is, the more the merrier.  Same thing on Saturday night. By the time Monday rolls around, I might be ready to rest "for a wee bit" (as my Scottish guests would say!)

Oh, how I love church life. 

Dear friend, Mike Giordano from southern California, sharing the Word with us (off his i-pod...Mike is ever the cutting edge kind of guy!)

Mike and young Matt-the-artist (standing), fellowshipping with Joe and Yvonne (sitting)

Praying together...church didn't dismiss last night until 11:30 pm!!!

big fish, caught this afternoon, fried and grilled and eaten just now!

Happy men - Ted (giving the "thumbs up, Imahappyguy" sign), my Tim, Ron, and Joe

these are just the ones they brought back to filet and eat for dinner.  All in all, they caught 21 fish today!

So.  Who wants to come stay with us next?

::smile::

One Year Celebration!

One year ago this week, I felt a migraine headache coming on.  Overwhelming things were happening in my personal life, on top of a Master Builder's National Conference we were expected to attend, and so it was with no surprise that I had the familiar symptoms.  I braced myself, and mentioned it to my husband.

There were no angels singing, no scrolls dropping from heaven, and unfurling themselves revealing the words, "BE HEALED".  There wasn't a single goose bump.

My husband simply laid his hand on me, right there in our master bathroom, and prayed a very simple prayer.  It took twenty seconds.

All I felt, was a lingering warmth on the back of my head.  Honestly, I chalked it up to the fact that his hand was on top of my head.  Maybe I was "feeling" the warmth of his hand, just in a different place?

But I did take note of that sense of warmth.  And I waited.  The migraine never came.

Not only that, but friends, from that day to this, one year later, I have not had one single migraine headache.  I had been getting them every month or so for over a year by then.

Not.  One.  Headache.  From the first week of August, 2009, to this day.

It was such a testimony to me, one year ago this week.  I will never, ever stop proclaiming that my God is a God of all Grace, and that He is a supernatural God, who is still in the healing business.  My prayer and cry of my heart is that I never become critical and jaded and unbelieving.

Do I believe this means I will never, ever have another migraine?  Here is what I do believe:  I have gone for one full year, with barely even a tension headache, while enduring some of the keenest testing in my whole life.  I have walked in a peace that passes understanding, from one year ago to this moment as I type.  That's it.  That's what I know. 

I know that healing touch was also a sign, for that season, to Tim and I regarding some very personal things we were going through at the time - God loved us and approved of our labors in the gospel.  He was, and is, on our side always.

Anniversaries of the spirit...they can be powerful things.  Here I am, at this year's Master Builder's National Conference, preparing to speak tomorrow, enjoying the fellowship of faithful relationship, savoring my friends and family, entering the best season of my life so far...

...encompassed by songs of deliverance.  I will never trade a lift hid with Christ in God for a life of playing church in my own strength.

My own strength and performance can't heal migraines.  But Christ can.

...and I Quote

“Such is beauty ever ~ neither here nor there, now nor then, neither in Rome nor in Athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire. If I seek her elsewhere because I do not find her at home, my search will prove a fruitless one."

~Henry David Thoreau

Beauty at home.  Your home-home, your home church, your home town.  If you can't see it there (and it is there....oh, it is there!), then you simply do not have eyes to see.

Pray for the eyes to see.

"They Are What They Contain..."

Here is one thing I know for sure:  you can have an amazing house, and it not be a home.  A home is far more than an architectural style, far more than its materials, or even its location.  A home is the very essence of the people who live there...if the husband and wife truly love each other, there is a winsomeness and a peace in that home.

(from the blog "Pink and Polka Dot" - a fantastic resource for all things slipcover and DIY...)

Another Day is Done

Watching the flooding in Pakistan on television this morning, I was struck by the fragile flower that life is.  (I know...this is a heavy way to begin a post - and on my twin daughters' birthday at that!  Stick with me, I hope you'll be encouraged.)

Our life is a vapor, Proverbs says, and then it vanishes away.  I saw a man in Pakistan, about my age or older, clinging to a large chunk of something, hanging on for dear life, in all those raging flood waters.  I will never know if he made it out alive. 

But I have him to thank, whoever he is.  For some reason, it hit me with vivid reality that life is lived one long day at a time.   Thousands of days that man had lived, and it all came down to what may have been his few final minutes.  I watched that man, for a moment, and was overwhelmed with the fact that he was born, had a childhood, probably loves someone, or several someones.  A lifetime of memories were right there, clinging and fighting just so that one more day could be lived.  That man, if he lived, will never again have an ordinary day.

I hope I don't, either.

Someone said "the days are long, but the years are short" and they were exactly right.  My life has been lived, thus far, one minute...one hour...one day at a time.  I was born, I had a childhood, I've learned a few things and loved a whole lot of people.  Countless moments, one after another, add up to what is my whole life today.  Much effort, many prayers, tears, laughter, pain, and joy have gone into my one life already.

And it could easily be all over in a matter of minutes. 

The human body cannot go ten minutes without oxygen.  In ten short minutes, my whole life, all its hours and its days and its years, could be finished.  Final. Any thoughts yet unspoken or unwritten would die with me, unexpressed.  Memories that are mine alone will slip into eternity with me, they will not be left behind in a box or gathered up with my things.  Why do we not spend more time reminiscing?  The Lord has been so good, and I am commanded to remember!  So that my children, and their children, will remember.  So that my friends will not forget.

Anything, to be remembered collectively, must be talked about, and more than once.  Time has to be taken, around dinner tables and over telephones, and in cars and in front of the fireplace.  Moments must be stolen back, and memorials made to the faithfulness of God.  "Remember when...??"

And how about these words:  "I love you."

And, "I am sorry.  Let's begin fresh, slates wiped clean.  You - a spouse, a parent, child, or a friend and child of God - you with an eternal spirit, you are far too important to be abandoned this way, and I want to come back and rebuild that which is eternal:  our relationship.  Quick!  Hurry, let us go back to loving each other before the sun goes down, and this one precious day is over!"

Fragile woman, I am.  Because my life is as a vapor, no day is ordinary.  Every day is a gift.  Life is far, far too short to not place urgent and immediate value on my relationships.  Theoretically, in less than ten minutes, all that has been left unsaid, will never be said, this side of heaven.  Every wrong not made right, will be left just as it stands in the heart and memory of someone I say I care about.

This day was not ordinary.  It was not common.  It was filled with the atmosphere of eternity, and loaded with value.  I pray I have invested it well.

Because I will, one day, stop breathing.  Less than ten minutes from that moment, I leave it all behind.  Ten short minutes.

This day, in pictures ~


I began it by filling the house with sunflowers - always sunflowers for my girls' birthday.


Stopped by this shop

For a dozen of these.  Oh...my...heavens.  So good.

Justin and Hannah brought this home from an antique shop today.  Timothy Paul will be joining us for dinner here, by this time next year.

Dad and a few of his kids, playing "that game".

And playing...and playing...(it is nearly eleven, as I type, and they are playing it again!)

Happy Birthday, my Sarah Howe!  Your first birthday as a married woman, and you are more beautiful than ever.  As the sunflowers will always say, "I am so proud of you!"

Happy Birthday, Hannah!  Timothy Paul is one blessed baby boy to have a mother who will love him so intensely...ferociously...creatively...and forever.  Your first birthday as a mommy, and I am SO PROUD OF YOU!

No...it has been no ordinary day.  Tomorrow will also be absolutely stunning in its unique opportunities and responsibilities.  The sunrise will be God's encore of the miraculous.  The moment my eyes open, it will be time to be about the business of loving God and loving people.  Oh, God!  May I live tomorrow's minutes and hours with full awareness of their worth!