Once in a while, I read a book that doesn't feel like a book. Instead, it feels like a conversation with a friend. It feels like I'm curled up in my favorite chair with a glass of wine or a cup of tea, and having some girl time with one of my favorite people. It feels comfortable and real and effortless and life-changing all at the same time. That's how I felt when reading Bread & Wine by Shauna Niequist.
I've read Shauna's other two books, Cold Tangerines and Bittersweet, and both of them were amazing. Both of them made me laugh and made me cry, and I had a sort of life epiphany while reading each of them. Shauna has a raw, familiar way of writing that just pulls you in and doesn't make you think as much as it makes you feel. You don't read a chapter and then think about it. You read a chapter and it affects your soul so that you can't help but reflect.
In Bread & Wine, Shauna (and I can call her simply Shauna because I feel like we're best friends, or should be!) adds to her usual reflections by expressing her love for good food and sharing that food with friends. This is the best of both worlds for me as it's two of the things I love most in life: amazing food, and good conversation. In the introduction to this book, Shauna writes:
What's becoming clearer and clearer to me is that the most sacred moments, the ones in which I feel the goodness of the world most arrestingly, take place at the table. The particular alchemy of celebration and food, of connecting people and serving what I've made with my own hands, comes together as more than the sum of their parts. I love the sounds and smells and textures of life at the table, hands passing bowls and forks clinking against plates and bread being torn and the rhythm and energy of feeding and being fed.
Yes! I often think about how life revolves around food, and yet the world tells me to place strict limits around my eating. Holidays and outings and time with friends usually have to do with food: we celebrate and mourn and pass time with food. We comfort and console and congratulate with food. The evidence of each of these shows on my hips and thighs and belly. There has to be a balance. And Shauna acknowledges that balance: feast, and fast. Eat, and play. And love...God, friends, family, ourselves. He made us to do all these things...to fast and to feast and to love. He gave me my love for good conversation and He gave me my love for good food. One line that made me burst unexpectedly into tears: I am God's plan A.
Shauna Niequist feeds us with this book. She feeds us emotionally with her words, encouraging from the pages and soothing us with her real-ness and just-like-me-ness. She feeds us spiritually by taking all that we eat and linking it back to the bread and wine of communion. She feeds us intellectually by challenging us to change the way we think about food and friends. And then, she feeds us. She gives us recipes of all sorts....scrambled eggs and biscuits and turkey burgers, cookies and salad and steak and risotto. I plan to work my way through all the recipes in this book, though I've only made three of them so far. I love to cook and am pretty accomplished in the kitchen, and what I love is that these recipes are elegant and guest-worthy, yet easy and do-able for even a novice cook.
Bread & Wine is a book that will often be found on my kitchen island, either because I've pulled it out to try another recipe, or because I wanted to read that one section just one more time. It is a book that speaks truth and soothes my soul, feeds my body and challenges my heart. It is real life at its best. Shauna wants us to feel and think and eat and pray. She wants us to bring our friends and family back to the dinner table and to see how many parts of us can be nourished by this simple act. In her own words:
I want you to invest yourself wholly and deeply in friendship, God's greatest evidence of himself here on earth. More than anything, I want you to come to the table. In all sorts of ways, both literally and metaphorically, come to the table.
Come to the table, indeed.
A couple of days ago I called my friend A. I had heard that she was interested in joining my Book Club so I gave her a call, even though I hadn't seen her or talked to her in, oh, maybe a year or so. But A. is one of those friends that you pick up with wherever you left off. We were laughing and catching up and it was like we had just talked yesterday. We laughed about our houses being a mess and our kids being obnoxious and sassy. We remembered moments we had been together before and how great it was. We picked up right where we left off and it was like we were the best of friends again. I love that.
A. and I are in different seasons of life. She has four kids aged eight and under, while I have two teenagers and an almost-ten year old. She's still doing diapers and finger foods while I'm back to working part-time and thinking about high-school graduation. Things are different for us, and as a result it's not quite natural for us to hang out together on a regular basis.
And yet...we've vowed to talk once in a while. We've determined to call or get together for lunch every so often, because someday....when her kids are all in school and life is a little less, you know, Mom-ish....we will get together often. We will be close, amazing friends. Because it's there now, that friendship. It's just hiding behind all the other stuff of life.
I think it's cool how friendships morph over time. Especially those deep, lasting friendships. There are times when you talk every day and tell each other everything. There are weeks when you're both busy and exist only on a quick text checking up on each other. It's life. But if you trust the friendship...if you trust the friend...you know that someday there will be time for each other again. And it will just pick up right where it left off.
I love that word--wanderlust--because it so perfectly describes how I feel about travel. It's not just that I love to travel. It's not just that I enjoy seeing new places and experiencing new things. It's that I lust for it. It feels like I need it like I need air. I value it as an important part of my life.
D. knows that I can only go a couple of months without going somewhere. He knows that as life gets crazy and we spend all our money on those pesky bills and food and gas and stuff, I can be content in our home for a few weeks before I start to get the itch to go somewhere else. Of course, I would love for that somewhere else to be London or the Caribbean or Seattle or Denver. But it doesn't have to be. It could be as simple as an overnight trip to the other side of the state. It could be a weekend camping. Or, in desperate times, it could just be a day trip somewhere different. A change of scenery, so to speak.
For the last couple of weeks, my Wanderlust has been particularly insistent. Many of those close to me have been traveling, while I've been here plugging along in my everyday life. My friend C. was on a cruise in the Caribbean, as were my parents. And my husband D. was on a work trip to Africa of all places, seeing new things and having new experiences. And I needed to get Away. However, our finances and time being what they are right now, there was no Away in sight. So, I asked D. if we could do something different over the weekend, and then I planned it.
Ann Arbor is not far from us...only an hour away...but neither of us have spent much if any time there. But it's a college town (obviously...U of M) and I knew we would find something fun and different to do. And part of the fun is the research. I found a Natural History Museum on campus and decided that was the thing. I put a shout-out on Facebook looking for fun places to eat, and my fellow foodies came through as always.
It was only a few hours, but we had a great time. We played:
That's A. pretending to get hit by the massive club-like tail of an ankylosaurus.
And here's D., J., and A. in a hollowed-out canoe. Fun!
We explored the museum and saw the planetarium, which was a surprisingly good show. Poor D. had two little boys next to him who wrestled the entire time, but he still learned where the phrase "dog days of summer" came from along with the rest of us.
And then, of course, we ate. We went to a fun little restaurant called Prickly Pear Southwest Cafe, which my friend M. recommended, and it was delicious! I had something outside the box for me: Chicken Poblano Rellenos.
It was unbelievable, and I was so happy with my choice!
We even got home from our outing fairly early...by 8:00, and had time for a family viewing of this week's episode of Survivor, but my Wanderlust is temporarily satisfied. Sometimes, all it takes is a day away doing something different than you normally do.
Oh, and eating good food. For me, travel is almost always about the food!!
I haven't always practiced the tradition of Lent. When I was a kid, all my Catholic friends talked about it, and gave up things like chocolate or Atari, and I didn't really understand the point. But then, I thought it was just a Catholic thing, and I didn't pay much attention. It was only as an adult that I started to understand the concept of Lent, and it's only been for a few years that I've been practicing it myself.
Last year was pretty tragic, if you want to know the truth. I jumped on the church staff bandwagon and decided to go with The Daniel Fast,. While it was a great experience for many of my friends, I found myself focused more on food than ever before, leaving myself little time to focus on God. My husband D. decided to do it with me, and he's a picky eater in some ways. So while I could throw some refried beans in a whole wheat tortilla and eat that for lunch just about every day, I had a hard time finding enough non-meat protein for my meat-and-potatoes-loving, non-refried-bean-eating honey. I couldn't figure out what to cook for dinner every night and it seemed like ALL I could think about. Well, and then there's the whole thing about how it put me in the hospital.
Okay, okay. It's entirely probable that The Daniel Fast didn't actually put me in the hospital. That was actually the fault of my gallbladder and about 30 small gallstones that gave me gut-wrenching, cold-sweat-producing, I-can't-breathe-because-of-the-pain problems. So really it was my gallbladder that put me in the hospital for a week and on the "nothing by mouth" diet for just as long. It's just that my first gallbladder attacks happened to coincide with my self-proclaimed "end of The Daniel Fast", and now the two are forever connected in my brain. So, right...no Daniel Fast for me this year.
I've been praying about what it will be for me this year...what God wants me to "give up" for Lent. And while I don't have an answer quite yet, I do have a few ideas. One idea that seems like a good thing for me is to give up listening to music of any kind while I'm in the car. For me, this will be rough. I like nothing better while I'm driving than to plug in my iPod and sing along to my music. Some of it is secular music, but a lot of it is praise music as well, so it's not that the music itself is bad. It's just that maybe for those six weeks, I will use that time differently. Maybe I will use it to count my many blessings, or to pray for my family and my church and my leaders, or to think about my morning Bible reading. Maybe giving up music in the car is an intentional way to enrich my prayer life.
Every year, I also mention to my kids that we're coming up on the season of Lent, and I ask them if they're planning to give anything up for it. I don't force it on them; they're all old enough to make their own decisions and make it part of their own faith. They've done well in the past, giving up fast food or whatever. None of them have made decisions yet as far as I know, so it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
What about you? Do you practice Lent? What does it look like for you this year?
Last week I read a novel for my book club. It was a good book all the way through, but one very insignificant line in the book took me off-guard. It was just a simple comment, but one that has stuck with me and that I've thought about over and over again since then.
The author was contrasting a large group dinner in India with one here in the States. She compared our Thanksgiving dinner with a family dinner in India. When those in India get together with family, often on a weekly basis, it usually consists of huge groups of people, cousins and neighbors and in-laws numbering well into the twenties and above. The women all get up early, gathering to cook together, laughing and talking and discussing everything while making dish after dish after dish.
Here, when it's Thanksgiving, we all stress out about everything that needs to be done. We get up alone at the crack of dawn, making lists and freaking out about what we're forgetting or how moist the turkey will be. Everything has to be perfect or it will ruin the entire holiday. Sure, we have fun eating together and watching football and playing games after the dinner, but the preparation is nothing if it's not stressful.
What's the difference? Why does the preparation in India tend to be full of joy and community, while for the most part Americans cook seperately in their own homes and then bring their "I hope it's good enough" dish to a dinner cooked by a sweaty, stressed-out host who is anxious for the whole thing to just be over with?
I know I'm generalizing. I know it doesn't always happen this way. There are many families in America who love cooking Thanksgiving dinner and who do it joyfully with friends and family. I'm sure there are also Indian families who stress out about what they're cooking. But something about what the author wrote rang true for me. I want that joyful community dinner experience. I want to gather in a kitchen with friends and cook whatever it is we're cooking while laughing and chatting. I want there to be less stress and more fun in entertaining. I want to invite people over even if I haven't mopped my kitchen floor in weeks, knowing that they will care more about the conversation than the cleanliness of my chaotic home. I want to bake cookies for a friend's visit and laugh together with her about how I burned the bottoms. Too often, I stress about the "stuff" and don't take enough joy in the "who". I want it to be about the people, not about the food.
I'm pretty sure that's what hospitality really is.
There is not much in the world that scares me. I have traveled to other countries and New York City by myself. I have gone after jobs that I was told I could not have, and was hired anyway. I can talk on stage and while I may be nervous, I express myself well and get my point across. I will tell anyone just about anything about myself. I will zip-line or bungee-jump or skydive, if given the opportunity. I like roller coasters and skis and flying, and when it comes to heights, the higher the better.
But put a tiny little creature with eight legs in front of me, and I turn into a screaming little girl. I don't know what it is about spiders that terrify me. Logically, I can think about it and realize that it's a little tiny bug and I can do way more to it than it can do to me. I can psych myself up and grab a tissue or a paper towel and go after it as though I'm about to conquer my fear. But as I get close to kill the spider, it will move or, I don't know....look at me wrong or something...and I run screaming and clutching my hands to my chest as though my life is in danger.
This morning as we were getting ready to go to church, I started to walk from my bedroom down the hallway to the kitchen. As I was walking, I nearly ran into a medium-sized spider hanging from a web-string right smack dab in the middle of my hallway. As I jumped back and squealed and did the "spider dance" as my husband calls it, the spider began making its way back up the web and onto the ceiling. J. and A. were just waking up and heard the screaming slight gasp of surprise and ran out to see what was wrong. J. is 13 and exactly like me, so she was terrified too and no help at all. After a few minutes of ridiculousness such as me running ducking down the hallway covering my head, and me squealing as the spider dropped back down on its web, and me claiming that it was looking at me with its beady little eyes and daring me to pass beneath it, A. came to the rescue. He's only 9, but apparently he did not get the "afraid of spiders" gene. He said "Oh my gosh, Mom", grabbed a tissue, and squished the eight-legged monster as though it was, well, a little tiny thing that couldn't hurt him. I could breathe again.
I may seem like I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. I really am serious when I say that spiders terrify me. There have been a few instances when I could take care of them in an emergency, but most of the time, I melt into a puddle on the floor when it comes to spiders. I guess we all have our weaknesses. I'm just a bit embarrassed that my weakness comes in the form of a tiny creature that I could kill with one finger if I really wanted to. By the way, you will never see me kill a spider with one finger. Just the thought of it sends me into the spider dance. Ugh.
Despite the fact that it has always been a dream of mine, I have never been part of a book club. This year, in the interest of being a little bolder in pursuing some of those dreams, I have decided to simply start my own.
It's strange, putting yourself out there. I mean, it's just a book club. But still there are all those thoughts about what if nobody comes, and what if I don't feel like cleaning my house that day, or what if I go to all the trouble for just my best friend and me, when the two of us can literally sit around in sweats and drink water and have a good time? But I'm going for it. I'm putting myself out there.
So I posted something about a book club on Facebook. And I got a couple of responses. And I think I'm going to have to be flexible. What I originally envisioned was a group of 6 or 8 women who get together month after month and drink wine and read books and really get to know each other. What I think is more likely is the possibility of a rotating group of women who sometimes come to Book Club and sometimes don't. They sometimes read the book and sometimes they don't. Occasionally, they come just for the wine. And this is hard for me...I am a planner and am not great at "winging it". But I'm stepping outside my comfort zone and I'm going with it. We'll see how it goes. It may never actually happen. But I've announced my first book, and I'm hoping for the best. I'll let you know!
