Year of Plenty Part 1: Proper Complexity

**This series is rooted in my weekly Sunday School class at Colbert Presbyterian Church in which we are studying the book A Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in the Pursuit of Christian Living. Our classes have been rich with discussion, so I wanted to continue some of the discussion here in order that we might all think more deeply about how our spending and eating choices affect both our spiritual and temporal lives.**



I was partially leading discussion yesterday, so I admit that I wasn't listening as well as normal. I was often focused on how to formulate my next question and when I should move the discussion along instead of attending to the discussion at hand. But I did glean some that I'd like to share.

First, a little back story. Craig Goodwin, the author, is a Spokane-area pastor. One Christmas, he and his wife Nancy realized how exhausted they were from the consumerist rush of the holidays. In a rock-bottom moment, Craig and Nancy decided that the year 2008 would be an experimental year in living locally. The Goodwin family was guided by four rules for the year: everything they bought had to be local, used, homegrown, or homemade. Local is defined as roughly the Eastern Washington and North Idaho area. As pastors, Craig and Nancy are also very interested in how all this applies to the Christian life. As you can see, it's a perfect book to be discussing in our particular location (and at this time of year). It's also a topic that's close to my heart.

My classmates are varied, thus it's quickly become apparent that no one person is going to approach this issue from the same background or come out with the same resolutions. We have avid canners and gardeners rubbing shoulders with those who shop mostly at Costco. The question I posed to my classmates yesterday arose from a chapter in which Craig creates a homemade pinata for his daughter's eighth birthday. After the experience, Craig writes: "We were discovering the importance of proper complexity."

My question is what is proper complexity?

It's more complex for me to make and can 14 quarts of applesauce. It took a considerable amount of time to pick the apples, chop and core them, fill jars, and process them in the canner. Each jar of homemade applesauce came to $2. It would take maybe 20 minutes max for me to drive to Fred Meyer to buy a jar of applesauce. Which is better? I think the answer is "It depends."

Which is why I think it's really important to ask this follow-up question: What is gained and what is lost by ____ (fill in the blank)?

In my example, what is gained by making my own applesauce? One easy answer: relationships. I purchased the apples from farmers who attend my church. While making the applesauce, I spent time by myself, praying and thinking and being present to the task and the process. With the extra applesauce, I fed my co-workers. With six of the jars, I'm able to share with my parents.

What was lost in making applesauce? Money and time I could have spent doing other things.

To be attentive to the two great commandments that Jesus reiterates in Mark 12:28-31 means the answers to many questions may never be the same two times in a row. It's more important to have the love of God and people as our overarching rules than to follow Craig and Nancy's local, used, homegrown, and homemade guidelines. However, it's very possible that to love God, the world he's created, and the people who bear his image, following Craig and Nancy's rules may provide an excellent framework for a proper and rooted-in-love complexity. Whether or not we like it, the world is complex, and we face choices every day that demand tough-love decisions from we who embody both the brokenness of this world and the beauty of the Kingdom to come.

***

How do you see this idea of proper complexity playing out in your own life? What decisions are easy to make? What decisions do you struggle with?

To Nourish My Beloved

I don't know what the deal is, but I've been on a food high recently. Maybe it's from preserving the apples, plums, and tomatoes of mid-September. Maybe it's having all these delicious fruits and veg (as the British say) on hand, the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, corn, peaches, plums, and apples of Green Bluff bounty. Whatever it is, I just LOVE food. My parents wonder who in the world Elizabeth Brink really is...did my mom really give birth to this crazy foodie?

But really, at the heart of my love for food is something intrinsically related to how God loves us. Food can be bland and stingy and unexciting. But the kind of food I'm trying to prepare, the kind of food I watch being prepared on the British TV show River Cottage, the kind of food I read about on various food blogs is incredibly like God's character. It bursts with generosity and goodness and hospitality. It's rooted in love. Love of the earth, sure, but most of all a deep love of the people who carry the Imago Dei.

Here's a quote I found thought-provoking. It was at the front of the cookbook The Sprouted Kitchen by Sara Forte.

"I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world."    ~M.K. Fisher

There are a number of things I love about this quote. But I'll start first with where it falls short. Mary Fisher mentions the brain and the hands creating meals to nourish, but she doesn't mention the heart. To me, cooking, and the rest of her quote, hinges on the heart. It's the love from our hearts that we pour into making food and giving it away, not just the cerebral knowledge or the muscle memory. That said, the rest of the quote is fabulous. We nourish people not just with a concocted stew, but with stories. Human beings are nourished by relationships, which happen over food and through stories.

The next part of the quote that I find so great is this: we nourish not just with rarities like perfectly cooked steaks and New York cheesecake, but also with plain dishes...with Kraft Mac and Cheese and home-canned peaches, after-a-long-day-of-work scrambled eggs and hasty blueberry muffins. We are nourished by the ordinary, every day stuff through which our lives of faith are built. Consistent and sacrificial decisions to be generous and to open the blocked caves of our hearts to the light and life of God's love that drives us to love our neighbors like we love ourselves.

So I invite you to join this wild ride called faith and let every deed you do rise up as a prayer of love to the God who is the giver of all good gifts.

And enjoy your next meal with gusto.

Holy Saturday Reflections on Fasting

I decided sometime back in Lent that I wanted to try fasting again. Real fasting. Like not eating for an extended period of time. (ACK!) At first I had decided to fast from after the Good Friday service at my church to Easter morning. But then, my friend Heidi called and wanted me to go to a Jon Foreman concert with her at the Service Station, a local coffee shop and concert venue. I definitely wanted to go, as Jon Foreman is a phenomenal solo artist (after leading the band Switchfoot for many years), but fasting didn't seem very compatible with a concert. Least of all, my stomach rumblings might seriously distract the other concert-goers. So, instead, I've been fasting from about 10 a.m. on Friday until now-ish, 3 p.m. on Saturday. Whenever I finish writing this post, I'll eat my fast-breaking meal of spinach salad with sliced radishes, golden raisins, and a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. Yum!

Fasting has made me realize a number of things. I hope you don't mind another list. :o)

1. I use cooking/baking as a means to avoid doing the things that I should do and want to do, but also don't take as much time to do as I should, such as reading, journaling, praying, cleaning, blogging, e-mailing, etc. When I came home from the grocery store at 10:30 this morning, I sat myself in my favorite living room chair and almost haven't moved since then because I've been reading, blogging and e-mailing. It's been great! When I'm cooking and baking, there's always something else to do...more dishes to wash, more baking time on that casserole, more sorting through my chest freezer to find the ingredient I want. But I've lately felt a driving need to just be...to plow through the growing stack of books in my room, to journal and self-reflect, to take the time to pray for others. To attend to, I guess you could say, the things of life that are like oil and gas to a car. The things that keep us running.

2. Food is as food does. Several times in the past two weeks, I've been so hungry before a meal that I get snappish and mean. I've also gotten into a habit of eating too much and thinking about food/cooking too much. It's definitely my main-stay hobby. There's no doubt in my mind that food is gift from God. But it has its place in the hierarchy of importance. If my eating and cooking causes me to neglect time with God or with others, then it's become a disordered love (as St. Augustine might put it).

3. Ironically, fasting has made me realize how much joy cooking, baking, and eating bring me. I really do use food as a means of loving, encouraging, communicating with, and caring for others. Serving people home-cooked meals, both impromptu and planned, delivering baked goods to work, eating my own creations, trying to be a good steward of my resources (both money and food), etc. are life giving to me. On Sunday, I made a whole wheat pizza with pesto that I had frozen from last summer, the last of my Monterey Jack cheese, asparagus (which is now in season and which I am trying to eat a TON of), broccoli, and wilted spinach. It was delicious! It gave me great joy to cook and eat the pizza that evening and enjoy it through the rest of the week.

4. Fasting makes me realize my frailty, how dependent I am on others and on God. As I was walking down the stairs in my house today, my legs were quivery. My hands are not quite steady. After missing the first meal, my thoughts weren't entirely clear. It's an infinitely good thing that God has made us so dependent on things and people outside ourselves or else we might be tempted to pride and independence more than we already are. Tomorrow, I'll enjoy a lavish Easter dinner with my mentor and her husband and seven others. I will provide the potato casserole. Dottie will provide the ham, asparagus, yams, and rolls. Stacey will provide the dessert. This meal in which we sit down to celebrate the amazing LIFE that we receive in the Resurrection will also be a testimony to our interdependence.

5. Fasting has made me thankful. In light of the super-abundance of Easter in which Christ lavishes forgiveness, new life, and freedom on us, I realize that my life is a continuous witness to the grace of God.

A blessed Holy Saturday to you as we live in the tenuous in-between of Christ crucified and Christ risen. Easter is on its way!