I like hanging out at the grocery store, it is one of my favorite places to be. I usually go there at least once a day. I do that because I like my ingredients as fresh as I can get them. I don’t necessarily spend a lot of money there, but I just like to shop and price things and plan. Yes I know that sounds strange. What is really strange is that in general I don’t like to shop. I make it to the mall maybe twice a year and I can’t stand to walk into a clothing store. When my wife does manage to drag me to the mall, I moan and groan the whole time we are looking at clothes. I hate shopping! I love walking around the grocery store though. All that food, all the possibilities of things that can be cooked with it! My love affair with grocery stores started in college at the University of Idaho. I did most of my own cooking in college and my roommates and I would go shopping at 2 a.m. in the morning. At that hour we had the whole place pretty much to ourselves. It was a fun place to hang out for a few hours before the donut shop opened at 3:30 in the morning. My friend knew the donut shop owner and she would let us in and we frost our own fresh donuts. There is nothing like a warm freshly frosted donut. Then we would all go home and finally sleep.
My love affair with the grocery story increased when I went to Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The seminary required that all unmarried students live on campus and eat at the cafeteria, something I had never done in college. The problem was the cafeteria food was awful. The building was officially called Katherine Lutheran Hall in memory of Martin Luther’s wife. The food was so bad though we called it Kitty Litter Hall. My friend and I detested the food so much that we usually ate out at one of the local restaurants instead. So I was paying money for board and then paying money to eat somewhere else, but at least I didn’t have to eat bad food. I have always believed that life is too short to eat bad food. Another thing my friend and I would do was to go to the grocery stores. We never bought anything mind you, we had no way to cook it, but we window shopped. We would walk down the meat aisle looking at the all the things we could be cooking if they would let us move off campus. The main two grocery stores we would go to were Cubs and Lions Foods, they were superstores. Superstores were new in those days, we liked them because they were huge and had tons of food. We sometimes wondered if we could buy some of this food and then break into the dining hall and cook it while everyone slept. We never did, but just dreaming about it made life a little easier.
I like visiting grocery stores and comparing them to each other. I know that certain stores carry this brand and other stores carry that brand and I am also pretty good at knowing what that brand costs and how it tastes compared to another brand. I always have my ears open to new stuff and new tastes. A good grocery shopper has to know their stuff. For instance with meat, different stores call the same grade or type of meat two different things. Sometimes an ingredient called for in a recipe has a different name at the store. I study to go shopping. It is almost like a sport. If I do it right and get the right ingredients and then I use the right techniques to cook it, well I have had a good day and everyone is happy.
Sometimes I think I am strange because I am fascinated by this stuff, but then I read in Scripture that this seems to be important to God as well. When God wants to point out that something is good, he uses food talk. He tells the Israelites that they are going to receive a land filled with milk and honey, he even gives them recipes. For the Passover they have to cook a lamb and they are given precise instructions on how to do this. When the Israelites are in the desert he sends manna and rains quail down upon them, you could say the grocery store came to them. In the New Testament Jesus is always eating with someone. When the disciples realize that they are in the middle of nowhere with five thousand people they tell Jesus, “Hey dismiss these people so that they can go to the grocery store and buy food.” Jesus instead, again, brings the grocery store them and feeds the people himself. The book of Revelation pictures heaven as a big banquet where God brings out of the storehouses, the grocery stores, the finest of meats and the finest of wines. Many people believe that when we get to heaven we will have jobs to do there. If that is so I call dibs on being the guy that gets to do the shopping, especially since it’s all free.
So is visiting the grocery store a little vision of heaven? Well I wouldn’t go that far, but is a wonderful relaxing place to be most of the time. So much food, so little time. What are you eating tonight?
Pastor Fred
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Ho, Ho, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum?
Christmas is over! For some of us that is a statement of relief and for others it is a statement of sadness. For me it is a little bit of both. My favorite songs during Christmas include songs like Joy to the World, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and White Christmas. I enjoy singing those songs and listening to them. They bring back many childhood memories and several of them are good ways to worship God and remember what Christmas is really all about, the birth of Jesus. My favorite song after Christmas though is Jimmy Buffet’s, “Ho Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum” with the tag line, “Santa’s run off to the Caribbean.” Jimmy Buffet came out with a Christmas album a number of years ago and that was one of the songs on the CD. In my office I even have a little figure of Santa wearing a swimsuit and riding the waves. I love to listen to that song in the car and sing along, but I change the words slightly to the, "Pastor’s run off to the Caribbean.” The Christmas season in the church is exhausting. There are programs, special services, and parties and then you add in family events, baking and shopping, and well as wonderful as it all is, thankful it finally ends. It all happens so fast too. It is like people are trying to shove a whole years worth of celebrating into a few weeks. It is many times too hard to control, in a sense Christmas happens to you and then it’s gone. One minute you find yourself at the fourth Christmas event in as many days and then next thing you know you are watching the ball drop and it’s a new year. That is when I get visions of playing in the sand in the Caribbean. I want a margarita and the sound of steel drums in the background. Although I have never went to Caribbean, I usually do take a few days after Christmas to come down from the chaos, relax, get my bearings and think about what I want to accomplish in the coming year. I need that time every year to get it all back together. We all do.
The time after Christmas is a good opportunity to refocus. Some do that by making New Year’s resolutions. They realize everything didn’t go as well as it could have gone last year and they want to make this next year better. I make resolutions as well. One of my big resolutions this year is to eat breakfast every morning. Now that doesn’t seem ground breaking but as a diabetic who chronically skips breakfast and just drinks coffee and maybe eats a donut, it is a significant one. I know that if I can keep this resolution it will go a long way to keeping my diabetes in check and will also help me eat healthier the rest of the day. It seems like a small thing, but over time I am confident it can lead to much better health. I also believe that this is a resolution I am actually capable of keeping. I like to cook so I plan to make it interesting and maybe during the year I will share some of the fast breakfast recipes I come up with. So resolutions are a good thing. Visions are better.
What do I mean be visions? Am I talking about prophetic visions? Am I talking about hallucinations? Since we just finished Christmas am I talking about visions of sugar plums? Am I just talking about seeing? No I am talking about focus, about what we are really looking at, what we are really concentrating on. I am talking about what is our central theme of life. What causes us to do what we do every day, the reason behind our actions, the object that our decisions are based upon. Resolutions though good tend to be short term and are aimed at fixing what is wrong with us. Visions are long term; they are aimed at how we can be all that God wants us to be. A resolution says I am fat so I need to lose weight. A vision sees an ideal that could be and focuses on the object that can make that ideal a reality. So where am I going with this? How did we get from playing steel drums in the Caribbean to talking about a vision for our life? Well because maybe it’s time to stop dealing with just the symptoms and deal with the problem itself. Instead of focusing on the symptom of being worn out, or being unhealthy or whatever it is that you are dealing with, why don’t we deal with problem behind it all, our disconnect with God. I put to you that if we make God our vision many of the issues we struggle with will be handled as well. That is not to say that everything will be perfect, we are sinners living in a sinful world so nothing is ever going to be perfect, but a strong relationship with God can put everything in its proper perspective so that we don’t end up getting wrung out all the time by the chaos that we live in.
During our worship service on New Year’s Day I based the sermon on an old Irish Poem composed by Dallan Forgaill in the 8th Century. The poem is Be Thou My Vision, and it was a part of the Irish Monastic tradition before it was put to song in 1912. The first few lines of the song say, “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, naught be all else to me, save that thou art; Thou my best thought by day or by night, Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.” I used the song because I thought it conveyed a good message for the start of the New Year. This is the type of vision that we need for 2012. We need to keep our eyes, our vision on Jesus this year. It won’t make the chaos go away but it will guide us through the chaos, it will keep us grounded and concentrating on what is really important, our relationship with God. If we put God first then all the other stuff will fall into place. When that happens then instead of being rung out by life, we can embrace life and live the way God wants us to live. So I challenge you to every day get up and let the first words of your prayer that day be, Lord be thou my vision today, and then let God take over. That doesn’t mean you can’t dream of the Caribbean, it just means you will already be focused when you get there.
Pastor Fred
The time after Christmas is a good opportunity to refocus. Some do that by making New Year’s resolutions. They realize everything didn’t go as well as it could have gone last year and they want to make this next year better. I make resolutions as well. One of my big resolutions this year is to eat breakfast every morning. Now that doesn’t seem ground breaking but as a diabetic who chronically skips breakfast and just drinks coffee and maybe eats a donut, it is a significant one. I know that if I can keep this resolution it will go a long way to keeping my diabetes in check and will also help me eat healthier the rest of the day. It seems like a small thing, but over time I am confident it can lead to much better health. I also believe that this is a resolution I am actually capable of keeping. I like to cook so I plan to make it interesting and maybe during the year I will share some of the fast breakfast recipes I come up with. So resolutions are a good thing. Visions are better.
What do I mean be visions? Am I talking about prophetic visions? Am I talking about hallucinations? Since we just finished Christmas am I talking about visions of sugar plums? Am I just talking about seeing? No I am talking about focus, about what we are really looking at, what we are really concentrating on. I am talking about what is our central theme of life. What causes us to do what we do every day, the reason behind our actions, the object that our decisions are based upon. Resolutions though good tend to be short term and are aimed at fixing what is wrong with us. Visions are long term; they are aimed at how we can be all that God wants us to be. A resolution says I am fat so I need to lose weight. A vision sees an ideal that could be and focuses on the object that can make that ideal a reality. So where am I going with this? How did we get from playing steel drums in the Caribbean to talking about a vision for our life? Well because maybe it’s time to stop dealing with just the symptoms and deal with the problem itself. Instead of focusing on the symptom of being worn out, or being unhealthy or whatever it is that you are dealing with, why don’t we deal with problem behind it all, our disconnect with God. I put to you that if we make God our vision many of the issues we struggle with will be handled as well. That is not to say that everything will be perfect, we are sinners living in a sinful world so nothing is ever going to be perfect, but a strong relationship with God can put everything in its proper perspective so that we don’t end up getting wrung out all the time by the chaos that we live in.
During our worship service on New Year’s Day I based the sermon on an old Irish Poem composed by Dallan Forgaill in the 8th Century. The poem is Be Thou My Vision, and it was a part of the Irish Monastic tradition before it was put to song in 1912. The first few lines of the song say, “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, naught be all else to me, save that thou art; Thou my best thought by day or by night, Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.” I used the song because I thought it conveyed a good message for the start of the New Year. This is the type of vision that we need for 2012. We need to keep our eyes, our vision on Jesus this year. It won’t make the chaos go away but it will guide us through the chaos, it will keep us grounded and concentrating on what is really important, our relationship with God. If we put God first then all the other stuff will fall into place. When that happens then instead of being rung out by life, we can embrace life and live the way God wants us to live. So I challenge you to every day get up and let the first words of your prayer that day be, Lord be thou my vision today, and then let God take over. That doesn’t mean you can’t dream of the Caribbean, it just means you will already be focused when you get there.
Pastor Fred
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