Update and Happy 100 Posts!

Happy 100 posts, everybody!

Sorry it's been so dead over here. Things have been really chaotic and I've neglected both cooking and posting about it. I made a truly incredible ratatouille the other week with local organic vegetables that was probably the best thing I've ever eaten. I'm going home next week and making it for my grandmother, so I'm really excited about that.

There's a great chapter in Ginny's book where she writes about her grandmother cooking a meal for her when she was healing. She was worried that because her grandmother wasn't familiar with the macrobiotic diet, that the food might alter her fragile health. The macrobiotic practitioner she spoke to smiled and told her that if it was made with good, fresh, whole ingredients and with a loving, healing intention, the food would be nutritious and healing.

Right now my grandmother is recovering from major surgery, so I look forward to cooking a meal for her with all my best intention! My grandparents are both quite ill right now, so I'll be going home for a week to be with them and support my family. If you guys could pray for our family right now, that would be great. God sometimes speaks in incredibly literal ways, and I know that He reached into my life and spoke to me last week.

I have a particular affinity for the book of Jonah, because it was the first scripture that we studied when I joined my church, and the book and verses from it always seem to pop up in my life when God wants to make sure I get the message. I also really identify with Jonah as a fellow stubborn person who literally has to be forcibly digested before I concede defeat.

To me the most poignant part of Jonah is the break in the text where the entire rhythm of the document shifts, and he sings from below the water.

From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,

and you listened to my cry.

You hurled me into the depths,

into the very heart of the seas,

and the currents swirled about me;

all your waves and breakers

swept over me.

What an incredible moment. It's so quiet. The silence and the stillness, represented by the break in text are so profound. I can just remember in my life last year being so sick and fighting like crazy to be back up North and fighting against my body and everything that happened in my past as hard as I could, and finally, after one particularly painful hospitalization, I just stopped. When it's time for a change in direction, when you're ready to come up for air and to go some place new, if you humbly submit yourself to change and are willing to accept and trust the unconditional love waiting for you on the other side, it's going from drowning to safety.

I know that this is particularly relevant in my life. I tend to fight and kick and scream my way through everything, and as my friend Allison so aptly put it, "do things the most difficult way a human being can ever contrive to do them." I often confuse defending things that are important to me with being defensive. But it's important to remember that God knows the things I love and the things that are important to me. It's a pretty awesome concept. So I am going to try to put down my fists and accept what God has planned for this unexpected turn in my life.