Being #Blessed and Empty Gold // The Sunday Paper

It's Sunday, and I'm happily in sweatpants and a thick sweater and drinking hot chocolate on the pull out couch (which is a lot more comfortable that it sounds) - I hope this finds you in a similar situation.  Assuming that you are, you have a second to talk about some of my favorite / most thought-provoking / yummiest internet finds this week, right?  Let's do it.  

Something to think about:

"There are about 50 words and phrases I'd like to banish from the vocabulary of the North American Church forever and ever - 'missions/missional/missionary' and 'it's a God thing' among them - but way up there at the top of my list is the term “blessed” . . . We've created a culture in which we measure God's “blessings” in terms of dollars and cents, comfort and pleasure, wealth and well-being."

JAIME, "#BLESSED"

"Jesus didn’t die on the cross so you could meet a nice girl that shares your values and settle down." 

                                                                                  BRIAN KAMMERZELT, "THE MOST ELIGIBLE CHRISTIAN BACHELOR"

"Fatal diagnoses. They're suffering in themselves. The choices, the conversations, the preparing one's self. It's terrifying, it's humbling, it's real life shit. So why, in our self-righteousness, must we add our opinions to the mix?" 

AMBER THOMAS, "OPINIONS ARE LIKE ASSHOLES: EVERY BODY'S GOT ONE"

Something to listen to:

You may already know electro-pop's freshest face, Halsey, from her singles "Ghost," and "Hurricane."  She recently released her debut EP, Room 93, and I can't stop thanking her for it!  I mean, we don't really talk, but if we did our conversations would definitely be mostly me praising her profusely for her newly-released five song collection.  It's got her first two singles plus three more simple, powerful tracks that have the music world holding its breath to listen.  Here, check it out - this one's my personal favorite!

Someone you should meet:

Everyone from Delight, which is my new favorite internet place to be.  I mean, look at them.  They all just hang around wearing stylish coordinating outfits and laughing together and being creative and blogging about God, so if I can't be them, I am definitely forcing my friendship on one and all.  Their space is dedicated to God and the creative arts, and it is just lovely.  

Peter Kassig, also known as the guy who was helping bring aid to Syria over a year ago when he was taken by Islamic terror group Isis.  We've heard about his parents' efforts to bring him home, the implications of doing so.  We don't really know him, though - if you haven't yet, read these words  written by one of Kassig's friends overseas.   

(image from here)

A one-step plan to breaking your diet:

Candy corn in a cookie.  Ohh, my gosh, do you need this in your life.  The recipe comes from here originally, but I made a couple small changes and it's all right here so you can spend less time clicking and more time making and eating candy corn cookies. 

YIELD: About 20 cookies PREP: 10 minutes IN THE OVEN: 8 minutes TOTAL: 3 hours, because chilling

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup unsalted butter, soften

3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg                                                                                                                                                  1 tablespoon peanut butter

1 tablespoon vanilla extract                                                                    

2 tablespoons cream or half-and-half

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons corn starch

1 teaspoon baking soda

pinch salt, optional and to taste

1 1/2 cups candy corn (1o to 11 ounces)

1 cup white chocolate chips (or salted peanuts)                                                         

DIRECTIONS:

1. Beat butter, light brown sugar, granulated sugar, egg, peanut butter, and vanilla with an electric mixer until it's all light and fluffy, about 5 minutes.
2. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, and add the next 5 ingredients (through optional salt), and mix on low with the mixer or use a wooden spoon until just combined, or about 1 minute.  Don't overmix it!
3. Add the candy corn, white chocolate chips (or peanuts), and mix until just incorporated.
4. Form dough into 20 ish heaping mounds. Place mounds on a large plate, flatten mounds slightly, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 3 hours before baking. Do not bake with warm dough because cookies will spread and bake thinner and flatter. Important note - make sure the candy corn is on the top or middle of the cookie.  Otherwise, it will melt and stick to the pan or burn.  It might be best to place the candy corn on top of each cookie after placing them on the cookie sheet instead of mixing it into the dough.  
5. Preheat oven to 350F, grease a cookie sheet. Place mounds on baking sheet, spaced at least 2 inches apart (I bake 8 cookies per sheet) and bake for about 9 minutes, or until edges have set and tops are just beginning to set, even if slightly undercooked, pale and glossy in the center. Cookies will become firmer as they cool, so take them out when they look just a little too soft.  Allow cookies to cool on the baking sheet  for about 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack so that they can finish cooking.  

A Desire Which Nothing Can Satisfy // Chasing After God

Did your jaw just drop?  Mine definitely did when I read that quote yesterday.  Recently, God's been teaching me a lot about how to let him satisfy my needs, and it's really cool and so different from anything that I've ever learned about God before.  Part of letting God satisfy my needs, every single one of them, is to get rid of anything else that I'm using to fill the space in me where God should be.  It's what Elisha did when he literally burned his ticket to earthly success and cooked his livelihood for dinner over the bonfire. 

"So Elijah went from there and found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him. Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah. “Let me kiss my father and mother goodbye,” he said, “and then I will come with you.”

“Go back,” Elijah replied. “What have I done to you?”

 So Elisha left him and went back. He took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them. He burned the plowing equipment to cook the meat and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out to follow Elijah and became his servant." 

1 Kings 19:19-21

This idea of giving up things that keep me from depending on God in order to follow him better isn't something that I figured out myself.  It's coming at me from a couple of awesome Jesus books that I'm ready (and, of course, actual Jesus), and God's used them to show me some things in my life that I desperately need to get rid of if my goal is truly to follow him.  As I work my way through the areas that needed cleaning up, I'm faced with hard decisions followed by difficult actions.  I've had conversations that have left me breathless and my heart pounding on my rib cage like it's trying to bust out of there.  Apparently, following God is anything but easy - it's downright uncomfortable.  It is nothing like anything I've ever done.

It's not just the official giving up of the God-substitutes that's hard, though; it's sticking to that decision once I've made it.  Unlike Elisha's plows, most of the things that I attempt to put in God's place aren't burnable.  Committing to keeping them out of God's place isn't the end of it, even if I tell my friends so that they can hold me accountable and try to keep myself out of situations that will tempt me.  It takes a lot of self-control; in fact, self-control is pretty much the key to chasing God day after day after day, forever.   Broken record here:  self-control. is. hard.  I'm seeing that first hand as I struggle with keeping my commitments, and the fact that self-control is so unnatural to me forces me to rely on God to give the willpower that I so do not have.

Despite the struggle, or maybe because of it, learning how to follow God is exhilarating.  Doing scary things makes life exciting, doesn't it?  Also, doing things that I know matter in the long run . . . that makes life satisfying.  It's humbling, because I keep messing up, and it's making me thankful, because God keeps on picking me up.

Maybe you have something that you know is keeping you from being like Jesus?  A hard, potentially (in my case, probably) awkward conversation that needs to be had or a habit that needs to be kicked?  I'd recommend praying about it, and hope that God calls you to act on it.  I highly recommend that as well, by the way. //

Love,

Allie

P.S. M from The Life of Little Me was awesome and nominated me for the Blogger Recognition Award.  I got a chance to check out her blog, and I liked it a lot and I sometimes like to share things that I like so here ya go: click here, here, and here to read some of my personal favorites!

What Are You Looking At? // The Image Issue

HAPPY SATURDAY!  Saturday is one of the few days that I can almost always slap a "Happy" in front of in complete sincerity, because it usually means that there's either something fun or nothing at all going on all day, and that is like a new TSwift single to my ears.  Well, like the "Style" kind of TSwfit, not the "Welcome to New York' kind - I'm just not feeling that one as much.  That's me being extremely picky, though.  If we're being honest here, and we usually are, I've done little but listen to 1989 on super repeat for the last few days since its release.  In the shower?  "Clean" is blasting.  "Style" plays while I'm choosing my outfit in the morning, and it's all about "Blank Space" while I stare at my computer screen trying to create some more bad puns.

All of this intense Taylor time has lead to an extreme lack of productivity.  Like, I may have gone to school without a lunch this week as an indirect result of my obsession.  (Don't worry, I have a dad who works at my high school and usually lends me money for lunch when I'm on the brink of starvation.)  It's not just the fact that I'm constantly listening to every song as closely as possible in order to get all of the lyrics down, though.  It's also the fact that the music is on my phone, and so my phone is with me constantly, along with all of the fun little distracting features it has.  Exhibit A:  Instagram.  I have spent more time than I care to admit with that app lately . . . you know how that goes, don't you?  You scroll through your feed and then you click the little explore button and find a bunch of people you kind of know and before you can double tap you're at school the next morning without lunch.  I promise there's a point to this, that point being that the extra Instagram time I've been logging has ended in me seeing some really, really sad stuff.

It's Saturday, and it would definitely be easier to sit here and argue the merit of "Style" vs. "Welcome to New York" until the clock strikes midnight, but we've got to talk about other things.  Things like the fact that there are dozens and dozens of Instagram accounts around which were created for the sole purpose of validating anorexia, and that I scrolled through one of them while Taylor was singing her face off on my phone the other night and it broke my heart. 

I don't know if you've ever seen anything like it - pictures of girls with flat, flat stomachs and a thigh gap; pledges to eat less than 500 calories for the next 30 days tied to hope for satisfaction; hashtags like #suicide, #cutting, #anatipsandtricks to bring together everyone who's struggling so hard.  Impossibly low goal weights, unattainable body types, and most of all a scattered collage of broken people.  Overwhelmingly female teenage people, girls who are beautiful and talented and loved and, from the looks of things, don't know it at all.  

I don't know a lot about anorexia.  I know that it starts with a simple choice but quickly grows to become a disease that takes more than a choice to get rid of.  I know that it's destructive - to the body, of course, but also to the mind and relationships of the person affected.  I know that it can be triggered by a huge variety of things, and I know that it's been a big, scary black hole in the lives of people that I'm close to.  I know that many times, it's tied to some kind of deeper hurt or emptiness, and that a lot of people who are in that place are searching desperately for a way out.  

My chance happening across that Instagram account left me with an acute sense of wanting to do something about it.  I'm under no delusion that me writing a blog post about why anorexia is horrible and every girl who has struggled with it should just go eat a sandwich because she's beautiful no matter what the scale says is going to do any good.  I really don't have any business writing something like that; I've never walked in those shoes, so I can't pretend to know how they fit.  I'm writing for those of us who have friends who need our support, for myself and for you.  I don't know a lot about anorexia, but I've got to think that it's got something to do with the culture we're immersed in and that we, the people who create the culture, can do something to change that. 

Something like complementing our friends on the way they talk and act instead of the way they look.  I mean, what message does it send to my friend when I frequently tell her that she looks good, but keep silent when it comes to her kindness to other people or how creative she is?  Building each other up is vitally important, but I think we're doing it wrong.  We'd never, ever say in so many words that we choose our friends based on how they look or that their worth comes from their long hair and perfect body, but the way we complement them sends a totally different message.  

Looks are only important as indicators of where the heart's at.  For example, if I start to gain or loose a lot of weight and break out a lot, the problem isn't that I'm too fat or too skinny and acne-prone; the problem is whatever's causing that.  Maybe I'm overwhelmed or depressed or angry, and that's causing me to turn to food for comfort.  As friends, that's really the only reason that a person's appearance or weight ever deserves to receive much attention.  We need to care about what our friends look like only if that's helping us to better care for their other needs and to give attention to a place where they're hurting.  We should be able to put whatever presumptions we have about what people should look like aside in order to get a better look at what's really going on with them and to build them up as they need it. 

Phrases like, "I look so fat in that picture," or "I wish I was as skinny as you are!", too.  Those have to go.  It seems safe enough to self-deprecate in front of our friends - it will make them feel better about themselves to know that we think they're prettier, right?  Wrong.  All those words do is contribute to a culture that worships appearance and laughs at anyone who doesn't.  We've all had our skinny friend make a negative comment about her weight and wondered what that says about us, right?  That's what talking ourselves down in front of other people does - that attitude spreads, like a really dangerous mental wildfire.  Demeaning thoughts can't be allowed to enter our minds, take root, and escape our mouths anymore.  

This all sounds good, but in reality, it's really hard to act this way.  Most of us, I think, are so immersed in a society that tries with everything that it has to put outward appearances first and foremost that it's hard to behave apart from it.  The truth is that I'll probably publish this post with full intentions to be a blogger of my word and ignore what people look like, then turn around and mess up within the hour.  It won't be easy to make changes that affect everything from the way we interact to the way we think, but it is so, so worth it.  To have friends that focus on one another's unique abilities and traits and care for each other on a deep level? To have an entire culture that shifts its gaze from the outside in?  To make Instagram accounts that encourage image-driven starvation obsolete?  I'm more than willing to give it a shot!  You, too? Great.

Love,

Allie