KBOing

That’s “keep buggering on,” for those who may not have run into that particular initialism. Our family thanks Winston Churchill for the code he had with his wife Clemmie when they were tired of a situation that they couldn’t dodge.

“We must just KBO, all of us,” I think. The situation in our hospitals has not gotten better. Intensive care units continue to overflow, and the caregivers continue to give care to the best of their abilities. Gabriel is working a flex position, so he is getting a six week break in the cardiac ICU.

I have gotten a number of notifications of new email followers, probably due to writing about those very controversial subjects last month. You are quite welcome in this space, but I have to tell you, I rarely feel compelled to pick up hot button issues of our day. There is plenty of outrage in the world without me adding to it. Also I am the offspring of a father who hates controversy and a mother who admonished her children repeatedly, “Sweep your own doorstep first.” What you will find here could be pretty solidly described as a mom-blog, with a sprinkle of homeschool, a lot of garden, occasional links to cool stuff, some marriage advice distilled out of 20 years of living with my love, less parenting certainty than I used to have, but a lot more confidence in Jesus.

The world is a beautiful place full of promise, but it is also broken, groaning for redemption. Every day I can live in a way that adds to the glory in the world, or I can live in a way that adds to the heaviness.

This is my passion: I have been redeemed from destruction, and I am called as a follower of Jesus to model that redemption. If I add to the hurt and destruction, I am not living as a child of light and love. Somehow this makes decisions easier for me to make. Should I do this, or this today? Should I say this, or not? Should I delete that paragraph?

My career at this point is to stay home, take care of my family, love my husband, educate our children, and from that base I reach out to my neighbors, my church, people in the larger community. I enjoy online connections so much and have made some fabulous friends that I haven’t ever met in person, but I am more invested in the people whose faces I can see when we talk, the ones I can hug when we meet, the ones who plant mums across the street and need help to rake leaves.

When I write, I intentionally prod people to connecting offline. I know, there is a funny sort of gap involved in a person posting admonitions to the world wide web to get offline and find a flesh and blood person. Funny, funny me.

I mostly write because it is how I process stuff. I hope that if there is any “tone” to this blog, it is simply that how we live matters. We get to choose if it is bright and hopeful, dark and self-absorbed, or mind-numbingly boring.

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Autumn in northwest Pennsylvania is exquisite! This is only our second season in the area, but I may turn into a fall lover after all. Not necessarily the lover of everything dying while I drink pumpkin spice (I’ll draw the line at pumpkin tortilla chips), but the shining air, the harvest abundance, the last burst of bloom the garden puts out in these shorter days. I bring in loads of flowers because they will soon be gone and I want to look at them as much as possible.

I made a cake with apples that you would like too. It definitely adds glory to the world.

You can find the recipe for Sourdough Coffee Cake at Food Network, but let me tell you about some tweaks that will elevate it to the heavenlies.

Mix the recipe just as stated, but then!.. Grate an apple or two, and fold it into the batter (a little over a cup of apple shreds is good). You can decrease the sugar a bit if you like, since the apple adds moisture and sweetness, but do not skimp on the cinnamon!

My second tip is to bake your cake in a cast iron pan. I use a 10 inch skillet, and when this cake comes out of the oven, the people come running. I had it ready for breakfast when Gabriel got home from nightshift last week because if I had to work nights, I would be glum, and I can imagine how cheering it would be to walk into a house scented with apple cinnamon.

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Every day I am given in my hands the raw material for making a beautiful world. The ordinariness of life is easy to overlook as too mundane to mention, yet it nurtures the world. God holds it all together, of course, but He asks me to do some things to help out. The raw materials are simple: cheerful good-mornings, read-aloud chapters before starting math, and learning verses to music. Fresh coffee with breakfast and cups of spearmint tea at bedtime. Sometimes what is in my hands is sourdough starter or green beans and garlic cloves. It may be flowers or paper, pen, and a stamp. Occasionally it is a heaviness I have to carry to Jesus in prayer for days on end, and I don’t even know what He is going to do about it, but I keep praying.

I know the niggardly tendencies of my own heart. When I live out of the kindness of Jesus because He has been so indescribably generous to me- that makes all the difference. He is the one who will heal this weary old world, but He is asking us to pitch in. We don’t get to quit, indulge in a private pity party because everything is just too much for us.

We have to KBO, friends. (Sorry for jerking you from the spiritual to the physical so repeatedly, but I don’t believe in a sacred/secular divide anyway.)

What is in your hands today? Please tell me about the raw materials you have been given.