Sometimes this is the question when we're in the blender, and the detail not worth remembering is how the "blend" button was pushed and who pushed it. The date on the piece of paper was a month ago today and strangely I can't remember the details. I guess what isn't repeated isn't remembered.
Divine forgetfulness; it's a mercy and a grace. What's worth remembering is the conversation with the Lord after the question, "What do I do with this fact that the button's been pushed and the blender's
on?"
I read my own handwriting asking for wisdom in furious scrawl. Then I read, "I turn my heart toward Yours." The letters forming the scripted cry are just unsteady blend of long and short hand.
Potatoes are boiling. Texan beef sausage is frying in the cast iron skillet and leeks are diced and heaped green on the bamboo cutting board with the non-skid rubber at the corners that every cutting board should have.
The potatoes are soft and the leeks sauteed. The sausage is cooked crisp; and is there anything that smells better than leek sautee and crisp sausage?
I ladle leeks, potatoes, and hot potato water into the blender and, I confess, I always get nervous before blending boiling hot in a glass blender with a rubber lid that has a removable stopper because what if the glass brakes? Or what if the stopper pops off?
Steam is a powerful force and I can see a weather pattern beginning to form inside the blender. It's hot and humid in there and that's storm popping weather in these parts. And in my kitchen. It's happened before. My kitchen's been taken by storm before. It's been splattered by hot, leek-potato blend all green before. The stopper's popped off my blender before.
I like storms as long as I'm not under the illusion that I can control them. I like them outside. I can't press them down, put a lid on them and keep the stopper stopped. I know I can't, so I trust God in the big ones that cover the sky and rattle the windows. But in my blender? I get a little anxious about that. And in my life? Well, sometimes storms churn life into a puree and just blend me up till I can empathize with this soup in the blender.
I don't like storms that splatter puree onto kitchen cupboard, counter, and floor; and I don't like storms that churn me into a puree and pour me out like blended leeks and potatos into the soup pot.
I don't like feeling as blended green soup; even less, looking like it and winning a few askance glances. But sometimes I'm in the soup pot. I just am.
I spoon leeks and ladle potatoes and potato water into the blender. The kitchen towel hangs on a hook by the sink. I reach for it, wad it up, and press it between the stopper and my hand. Just in case. A hot potato storm's about to rotate at the speed of a tornado just blending everything into a puree.
"Be anxious for nothing" goes through my head as I step back as far as my arm is long, press the blend button and potatoes boiled soft and leeks sauteed limp churn green so violent fast that they are soup in less than ten seconds.
I pour it into the soup pot. A green puree. And just like that the three ingredients are blended into one and forever changed. I think I know what that feels like.
Blender with Potatoes and Leeks
Thing is, when we go through the blender, we come out changed. We look different and our lives take on a different spin and shade. And the questions we ask change. Go through the blender and somehow the "why" and "who" questions don't matter much anymore. What matters when we're reeling and maybe feeling a little green is, "Do I believe that God pressed the blend button? And what matters are, "How sovereign is sovereign?" And, "What does God's love really look like? What does His love do to me?" The questions are asked frantic when "Watch out! I'm about to blow!" is churned out dizzy nervous because the starch of life and everything living all leeky green is as spinning funnel and the the eye is blurry just, "Where is the center of the universe anyway?"
I turn back to my scrap piece of paper where I've written, "God is the center of the universe. He is the eye of the storm."
It's true. He is the center. I can live as if He's not. I can live like that even when I feel like I've been spooned into the blender; but that doesn't make it less true. I can cry out as if I am the center of the universe, and people who love me more than they love God will move everything in their power to rescue me and for all their kindness, "Thanks, but no thanks." I don't need the reinforcement of my self-centered nature. Honestly, I don't want to be self-centered, but God-centered; and I need fewer rescues by those who love me more than they love God; who trust their rescue of me more than they trust the strange sight of God's love for me.
Then there are those people who claim to love me, but they don't. Not really. They flatter themselves, saying, "I love her enough to be tough." It's this thing called "tough love" and is this much different in the end than those who flatter me with their rescuing version of love? Both versions end up displacing God. Both versions forget the fact that God says He is sovereign over everything in heaven and on earth and under the earth and that no one and nothing, neither angel nor demon, neither man nor woman nor circumstance can thwart His purposes.
God has reasons for pressing the blend button and maybe one reason is to let centrifugal force spin me away from the center of my life. May I be pushed to the outer edge, and may God be the center of my life. May He be the eye and may I begin to see Him through His eye, not mine. See God through His eye and begin to see everything differently.
See like this and love differently.
Tough love. I don't think He'd define it the way most do. I google, "What is tough love?" I want to know what this term is supposed to mean, and find that it's meant to "encougarge self-help by restricting benefits" (North American Web). Is this right?
I ask because it's been tried and doesn't seem to work. I ask because it didn't work when I tried it, and because I've been in rooms full of others who've tried it and it hasn't worked for them, either. I ask because doesn't Christ encourage us toward helping others? Isn't it by seeking to aid others that we find aid for ourselves? And isn't the help that we all need, but can't get for ourselves, the help that Christ gave not by restricting benefits but by benefiting us through the restrictions He put on Himself?
I press the puree button on my blender. Potatoes boiled soft and leeks sauteed limp spin so fast that in ten seconds they are soup, and I marvel at the Savior who left Heaven's peace. He left the holy still power and came to this spinning blender called human life on earth where a mother fears for her daughter; a wife fears for her husband; friends fear for friends; parents fear for their son because these need help and everything tried just isn't working. They aren't seeking the help they need and the restrictions care-takers offer seem to benefit no one; not even themselves.
I press the stop button.
Maybe it could be said, "Tough love doesn't work; but Trust Love does."
Trust Love.
It was said long ago; "Lean not on your own understanding, but trust in the Lord with all your heart" (Proverbs 3:5). Is this Trust Love?
Earth Spin
Jesus stepped onto this rotating earth that spins at one-thousand miles per hour and where great wheels of ocean streams and air currents churn in circles by the very energy of his spinning orb that's seventy-one percent water. I think it to myself as I lift the blender from the base and, "You placed Yourself into this blender" is the whisper of a marvelous thought.
I pour the soup into the soup pot, place a second batch of soft and sauteed into the blender, and before I can press the start button I hear Him speak to me; "I created this blender with my Father and our Holy Spirit." He's talking about the very beginning when God said, "Let there be light" and the earth began to spin.
"The spin started before the sin started," I stare at the green puree in the blender and just let this thought churn, because there's something spiritual here. It churns out, "You started the spin and then said, 'Peace. Be still and know that I am God.'"
It's scary to watch loved ones fall down so many times that they can't think straight enough to walk straight no matter how much they want to. It's scary to wait , just wait because of Trust Love, while God's patience begins to seems like negligence.
Tough to trust Love while a life hangs in the balance. The friends of Jesus, and Jesus' mother knew about that as He shouldered the sins of the world in the hang.
Tough to trust Love to revive and resurrect.
Tough to trust the generous kind benefits of Love who offers birth before death and life instead of it.
I practice Trust Love.
The blender may puree a loved one till my insides turn to soup and everything in my understanding wants to lean hard on the "stop" button, but I practice Trust Love because God's proved faithful to press the "stop" button and when He does, I see that God understands with a patience I don't possess outside of trusting Him.
The kitchen is quiet. A holy pause. Just the blender, God, and me.
He whispers and I hear Him; "I stepped into the blender with you and your loved ones. I mixed with you so that you may be one in Me as I am one in the Father. I pray that you may be one in Us. I pray that the love with which the Father loves Me may be in you, and Me in you." I recognize His words from the Book of John, chapter seventeen.
We stand side by side, staring at the blender on the counter. More silence. Then I dare the whisper, "I step into Your love. Your love is the true blender."
I dare the speech because what I mean is that I long with a heart turned soft because I've soaked in the Living Water; I long to be blended, no, pureed, till all of Him is in all of me and I'm made into soup meant to be ladled into the empty bowls held out in cupped hands of the poor who hunger enough to line up at the soup kitchen on this spinning earth. Yeah, that's what I mean.
I press the start button. The blender whirs out the last batch of potato-leek soup; and Love confesses, "I pressed the start button. I pressed it in the beginning, and I pressed it when my mother Mary pressed Me into Joseph's hands and they held the Love that would put them through the blender and shred their hearts because that's just part of Love's sacrifice for the sins of the world. And I pressed it when the thorny crown was pressed onto My head, but the blood that soaked the earth at the foot of the cross soaked the thorns of the crown first. They meant to mock, but love won't be mocked because it's tougher than thorns."
Trust Love endures for the sake of the offender's freedom.
Trust Love wears the thorns, but His blood soaks them.
Trust Love bears the shame, but doesn't own it.
Trust Love is misunderstood and maligned, but will never displace God.
Trust Love is tough enough to press the blend button and then speak, "faith, hope, love; these three abide; and love is the greatest" over the whir of the blender.
I add the crisped sausage to the soup pot. As an after-thought, I slice up fruit for a side dish because love is a fruit of the Spirit and tonight that's what I'm serving.
Potato-Leek Soup with sausage because my husband's a meat and potatoes German who's lived in Texas cattle country for twenty of his fifty years.
The side dish? Well, I didn't plan on slicing fruit, but I do it real quick because love is a fruit of the Spirit.
And that's what this meal's all about.
written by: Carolyn-Elizabeth Roehrig
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